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THE VOYAGE OUT
VIRGINIA WOOLF

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THE
VOYAGE OUT

BY. ;. . . ^

^ 5, VIRGINIA WOOLF

NEW '^laJr YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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THE VOYAGE OUT

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THE VOYAGE OUT

CHAPTER I

AS the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embank-
ment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them
arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers* clerks will have to
make flying leaps into the mud ; young lady typists will have to
fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes
unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better
not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air
with your left hand.

One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic
was becoming brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the
pav^nent with a lady on his arm. Angry glances struck upon
their backs. The small, agitated figures — for in comparison
-with this couple most people looked small — decorated with
fountain pens, and burdened with despatch-bpxes, had ap-
pointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there
was some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed
upon Mr. Ambrose's height and upon Mrs. Ambrose's cloak.
But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond
the reach of malice. In his case one might guess from the
moving lips that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes
fixed stonily straight in front of her at a level above the eyes
of most that it was sorrow. It was only by scorning all she
met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of peo-
ple brushing past her was evidently painful. After watching
the traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two with a
stoical gaze she twitched her husband's sleeve, and they
crossed between the swift discharge of motor cars. When
they were safe on the further side, she gently withdrew her

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10 THE VOYAGE OUT

arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time to relax,
to tremble; then tears rolled down, and, leaning her elbows
on the balustrade, she shielded her face from the curious. Mr.
Ambrose attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but
she showed no signs of admitting him, and feeling it awkward
to stand beside a grief that was greater than his, he crossed
his arms behind him, and took a turn along the pavement.

The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pul-
pits; instead of preachers, however, small boys occupy them,
dangling string, dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper
for a cruise. With their sharp eye for eccentricity, they were
inclined to think Mr. Ambrose awful ; but the quickest witted
cried "Bluebeard !" as he passed. In case they should proceed
to tease his wife, Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick at them,
upon which they decided that he was grotesque merely, and
four instead of one cried "Bluebeard!" in chorus.

Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, mych longer than
is natural, the little boys let her be. Some one is always look-
ing into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand
there talking for half an hour on a fine afternoon ; most peo-
ple, walking for pleasure, contemplate for three minutes ;
when, having compared the occasion with other occasions, or
made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the flats and
churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines' o€
Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent
purple, sometimes mud-colored, sometimes sparkling blue like
the sea. It is always worth while to look down and see what
is happening. But this lady looked neither up nor down.; the
only thing she had seen, since she stood there, was a circular
iridescent patch slowly floating past with a straw in the mid-
dle of it. The straw and the patch swam again and again
behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear, and
the tear rose and fell and dropped into the river. Then there
struck close upon her ears —

Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the nine Gods he swore —

and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on
his walk —

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THE VOYAGE OUT 11

That the Great House of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.

Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she
must weep. Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than
she had yet done, her shoulders rismg and falling with great
regularity. It was this figure that her husband saw when,
having reached the polished Sphinx, having entangled himself
with a man selling picture postcards, he turned; the stanza
instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his hand on her
shoulder, and said, "Dearest." His voice was supplicating.
But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say,
*You can't possibly understand."

As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes,
and to raise them to the level of the factory chimneys on the
other bank. She saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and
the carts moving across them, like the line of animals in a
shooting gallery. They were seen blankly, but to see anything
was of course to end her weeping and begin to walk.

"I would rather walk," she said, her husband having hailed
a cab already occupied by two city men.

The fixity of her -mood was broken by the action of walking.
The shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than /
terrestrial objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms,
and little black broughams, made her think of the world she
lived in. Somewhere up there above the pinnacles where the
smoke rose in a pointed hill, her children were now asking for
her, and getting a soothing reply. As for the mass of streets,
squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt
at this moment how little London had done to make her love
it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a
street. She knew how to read the people who were passing
her ; there were the rich who were running to and from each
others* houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers
driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor
who were unhappy and rightly malignant. Already, though
there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and women
were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up

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1« THE VOYAGE OUT

seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton
beneath.

A fine rain now made her still more dismal ; vans with the
odd names of those engaged in odd industries — Sprules,
Manufacturer of Saw-dust ; Grabb, to whom no piece of waste
paper comes amiss — fell flat as a bad joke; bold lovers, shel-
tered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid, past their pas-
sion; the flower women, a contented company, whose talk is
always worth hearing, were sodden hags ; the red, yellow, and
blue flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not
blaze. Moreover, her husband, walking with a quick rhythmic
stride, jerking his free hand occasionally, was either a Viking
or a stricken Nelson ; the sea-gulls had changed his note.

"Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?"

Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply ; by this time he was far
away.

The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road soon with-
drew them from the West End, and plunged them into Lon-
don. It appeared that this was a great manufacturing place,
where the people were engaged in making things, as though
the West End, with its electric lamps, its vast plate-glass win-
dows all shining yellow, its carefully-finished houses, and tiny
live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along on
wheels in the road, was the finished work. It appeared to her
a very small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have
made. For some reason it appeared to her as a small golden
tassel on the edge of a vast black cloak.

Observing that they passed no other hansome cab, but only
vans and waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and
women she saw was either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Am-
brose understood that after all it is the ordinary thing to be
poor, and that London is the city of innumerable poor people.
Startled by this discovery and seeing herself pacing a circle
all the days of her life round Piccadilly Circus she was greatly
reUeved to pass a building put up by the London County
Council for Night Schools.

''Lord, how gloomy it isl" her husband groaned. "Poor
creatures 1"

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THE VOYAGE OUT 1»

What with misery for her children, the poor, and the rain»
her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.

At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being
crushed like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had
had room for cannon-balls and squadrons, had now shrunk ta
a cobbled lane steaming with smells of malt and oil and
blocked by waggons. While her husband read the placards,
pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which certain
ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to
find information. From a world exclusively occupied in feed-
ing waggons with sacks, half dbliterated too in a fine yellow
fog, they got neither help nor attention. It seemed a miracle
when an old man approached, guessed their condition, and
proposed to row them out to their ship in the little boat which
he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of steps. With some
hesitation they trusted themselves to his care, took their
places, and were soon waving up and down upon the water,
London having shrunk to two lines of buildings on either
side of them, square buildings and oblong buildings placed
in rows like a child's avenue of bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow
light in Tt, ran with great force; bulky barges floated down
swiftly escorted by tugs; police boats shot past everything;
the wind went with the current. The open rowing-boat in
which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across the line of traffic.
In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands upon the oars,
and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he
had taken many passengers across, where now he took
scarcely any. He seemed to recall an age when his boat,
moored among rushes, carried delicate feet across to lawns at
Rotherhithe.

"They want bridges now," he said, indicating the mon-
strous outline of the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen re-
garded him, who was putting water between her and her chil-
dren. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they were approach^
ing; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly
read her name — Euphrosyne.

Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the Unes of

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14 THE VOYAGE OUT

the rigging, the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew
out squarely behind.

As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man
shipped his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that
ships all the world over flew that flag the day they sailed.
In the minds of both the passengers the blue flag appeared
a sinister token, and this the moment for presentiments, but
nevertheless they rose, gathered their things together, and
climbed on deck.

Down in the saloon of her father's ship. Miss Rachel Vin-
race, aged twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt
nervously. To begin with, though nearly related, she scarcely
remembered them; to go on with, they were elderly people,
and finally, as her father's daughter she must be in some sort
prepared to entertain them. She looked forward to seeing
them as civilised people generally look forward to the first
sight of civilised people, as though they were of the nature
of an approaching physical discomfort, — a tight shoe or a
draughty window. She was already unnaturally braced to
receive them. As she occupied herself in laying forks severe-
ly straight by the side of knives, she heard a man's voice say-
ing gloomily :

"On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head
foremost," to which a woman's voice added, "And be killed."

As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the door-
way. Tall, large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Am-
brose was romantic and beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic,
for her eyes looked straight and considered what they saw.
Her face was much warmer than a Greek face; on the other
hand it was much bolder than the face of the usual pretty
Englishwoman.

"Oh, Rachel, how d'you do," she said, shaking hands.

"How are you, dear," said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his
forehead to be kissed. His niece instinctively liked his thin
angular body, and the big head with its sweeping features,
and the acute, innocent eyes.

"Tell Mr. Pepper," Rachel bade the servant. Husband and
wife then sat down on one side of the table, with their niece
opposite to them.

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THE VOYAGE OUT 16

''My father told me to begin," she explained. "He is very
busy with the men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper ?'

A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on^
one side of them had sHpped in. Nodding to Mr. Ambrose,
he shook hands with Helen.

"Draughts," he said, erecting the collar of his coat.

"You are still rheumatic?" asked Helen. Her voice was
low and seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the
sight of town and river being still present to her mind.

"Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear," he replied.
"To some extent it depends on the weather, though not so
much as people are apt to think."

"One does not die of it, at any rate," said Helen.

"As a general rule — ^no," said Mr. Pepper.

"Soup, Uncle Ridley?" asked Rachel.

"Thank you, dear," he said, and, as he held his plate out,
sighed audibly, "Ah ! she's not like her mother." Helen was
just too late in thumping her tmnbler on the table to prevent
Rachel from hearing, and from blushing scarlet with embar-
rassment.

"The way servants treat flowers!" she said hastily. She
drew a green vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and began
pulling out the tight little chrysanthemums, which she laid on
the table-cloth, arranging them fastidiously side by side.

There was a pause.

"You knew Jenkinson, didn't you, Ambrose?" asked Mr.
Pepper across the table.

"Jenkinson of Peterhouse?"

"He's dead," said Mr. Pepper.

"Ah, dear ! — I knew him — ^ages ago," said Ridley. "He was
the hero of the punt accident, you remember? A queer card.
Married a young woman out of a tobacconist's, and lived in
the Fens — ^never heard what became of him."

"Drink — drugs," said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness.
"He left a commentary. Hopeless muddle, I'm told."

"The man had really great abilities," said Ridley.

"His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still," went on
Mr. Pepper, "which is surprising, seeing how text-books
change."

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16 THE VOYAGE OUT

"There was a theory about the planets, wasn't there ?' asked
Ridley.

"A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it," said Mr. Pep-
per, shaking his head.

Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside
swerved. At the same time an electric bell rang sharply again
and again.

"We're off," said Ridley.

A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the
floor; then it sank; then another came, more perceptible.
Lights slid right across the uncurtained window. The ship
gave a loud melancholy moan.

"We're off !" said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she,
answered her outside on the river. The chuckling and hissing
of water could be plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that
the steward bringing plates had to balance himself as he drew
the curtain. There was a pause.

"Jenkinson of Cats — d'you still keep up with him?** asked
Ambrose.

"As much as one ever does," said Mr. Pepper. "We meet
annually. This year he has had the misfortune to lose his
wife, which made it painful, of course."

"Very painful," Ridley agreed.

"There's an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him,
I believe, but it's never the same, not at his age."

Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.

"There was a book, wasn't there?" Ridley enquired.

"There Tvas a book, but there never Tvill be a book," said
Mr. Pepper with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at
him.

"There never will be a book, because some one else has
written it for him," said Mr. Pepper with considerable acid-
ity. "That's what comes of putting things off, and collecting
fossils, and sticking Norman arches on one's pigsties."

"I confess I s)mipathise," said Ridley with a melancholy
sigh. "I have a weakness for people who can't begin."

"... The accumulations of a lifetime wasted," continued
Mr. Pepper. "He had accumulations enough to fill a bam."

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THE VOYAGE OUT 17

"It's a vice that some of us escape/! said Ridley. "Our
friend Miles has another work out to-day."

Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. "According to my
calculations," he said, "hi has produced two volumes and a
)ialf annually, which, allowing for time spent in the cradle and
so forth, shows a commendable industry."

"Yes, the old Master's saying of him has been pretty well
realised," said Ridley.

"A way they had," said Mr. Pepper. "You know the Bruce
collection? — not for publication, of course."

"I should suppose not," said Ridley significantly. "For a
Divine he was — ^remarkably free."

"The Pump in Neville's Row, for example?" enquired Mr.
Pepper.

"Precisely," said Ambrose.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex,
highly trained in promoting men's talk without listening to it,
could think — about the education of children, about the use of
fog sirens in an opera — without betraying herself. Only it
struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess,
and that she might have done something with her hands.

"Perhaps ?" she said at length, upon which they rose

and left, vaguely to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had
either thought them attentive or had forgotten their presence.

"Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days," they
heard Ridley say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing
back, at the doorway, they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had
suddenly loosened his clothes, and had become a vivacious
and malicious old ape.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on
deck. They were now moving steadily down the river, pass-
ing the dark shapes of ships at anchor, and London was a
swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy drooping above it.
There were the lights of the great theatres, the lights of the
long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of domestic
comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would
ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon
them for hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the
town should blaze for ever in the same spot ; dreadful at least

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18 THE VOYAGE OUT

to people going away to adventure upon the sea, and beholding
it as a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally
scarred. From the deck of the ship the great city appeared
a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, "Won't you
be cold?" Rachel replied, **No. . . . How beautiful!" she
added a moment later. Very little was visible — b, few masts,
a shadow of land here, a line of brillijyit windows there. They
tried to make head against the wind.

"It blows — it blows!" gasped Rachel, the words rammed
down her throat. Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly
overcome by the spirit of movement, and pushed along with
her skirts wrapping themselves round her knees, and both arms
to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of movement died
down, and the wind became rough and chilly. They looked
through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were
being smoked in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose
throw himself violently against the back of his chair, while
Mr. Pepper crinkled his cheeks as though they had been cut
in wood. The ghost of a roar of laughter came out to them,
and was drowned at once in the wind. In the dry yellow-
lighted room Mr. Pepper and Mr. Ambrose were oblivious of
all tumult ; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about
the year 1875.

"They're old friends," said Helen, smiling at the sight.
"Now, is there a room for us to sit in?"

Rachel opened a door.

"It's more like a landing than a room," she said. Indeed
it had nothing of the shut stationary character of a room on
shore. A table was rooted in the middle, and seats were stuck
to the sides. Happily the tropical suns had bleached the tap-
estries to a faded blue-green colour, and the mirror with its
frame of shells, the work of the steward's love, when the
time hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than
ugly. Twisted shells with red lips like unicorn's horns orna-
mented the mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall of purple
plush from which depended a certain number of balls. Two
windows opened on to the deck, and the light beating through
them when the ship was roasted on the Amazons had turned

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THE VOYAGE OUT 19

the prints on the opposite wall to a faint yellow colour, so that
"The Coliseum" was scarcely to be distinguished from Queen
Alexandra playing with her Spaniels. A pair of wicker arm-
chairs by the fireside invited one to warm one's hands at a
grate full of gilt shavings; a great lamp swung above the
table— the kind of lamp which makes the light of civilisation
across dark fields to one walking in the country.

"It's odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr.
Pepper's," Rachel started nervously, for the situation was
difficult, the room cold, and Helen curiously silent.

"I suppose you take him for granted?" said her aunt.

"He's like this," said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in
a basin, and displaying it.

"I expect you're too severe," Helen remarked.

Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said
against her belief.

"I don't really know him," she said, and took refuge in
facts, believing that elderly people really like them better
than feelings. She produced what she knew of William Pep-
per. She told Helen that he always called on Sundays when
they were at home; he knew about a great many things —
about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and
the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into Eng-
lish prose, and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an
authority upon coins, and — one other thing — oh yes, she
thought it was vehicular traffic.

He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write
upon the probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was
his hobby.

"I've got all his pamphlets," she said. "Little pamphlets.
Little yellow books." It did not appear that she had read
them.

"Has he ever been in love?" asked Helen, who had chosen
a seat.

This was unexpectedly to the point.

"His heart's a piece of old shoe leather," Rachel declared,
dropping the fish. But when questioned she had to own that
she had never asked him.

"I shall ask him," said Helen.

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**The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano/* she
continued. "Do you remember — the piano, the room in the
attic, and the great plants with the prickles?'*

"Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through
the floor, but at their age one wouldn't mind being killed in
the night ?" she enquired.

"I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago," Helen stated.
^*She is afraid that you will spoil your arms if you insist
upon so much practising."

"The muscles of the forearm — and then one won't marry?*'

"She didn't put it quite like that," replied Mrs. Ambrose.

"Oh, no — of course she wouldn't," said Rachel with a
sigh.

Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than de-
cided, saved from insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; de-
nied beauty, now that she was sheltered indoors, by the lack
of colour and definite outline. Moreover, a hesitation in
speaking, or rather a tendency to use the wrong words, made
her seem more than normally incompetent for her years. Mrs.
Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now re-
flected that she certainly did not look forward to the inti-
macy of three or four weeks on board ship which was threat-
ened. Women of her own age usually boring her, she sup-
posed that girls would be worse. She glanced at Rachel again.
Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emo-
tional, and when you said something to her it would make
no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon
water. . There was nothing to take hold of in girls — nothing
hard, permanent, satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three
weeks, or did he say four? She tried to remember.

At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly
man entered the room, came forward and shook Helen's hand
with an emotional kind of heartiness, Willoughby himself,
Rachel's father, Helen's brother-in-law. As a great deal of
flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of him, his
frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large
framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and
the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand

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THE VOYAGE OUT 81

assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emo-
tions, or to respond to them in others.

"It is a great pleasure that you have come," he said, "for
both of us."

Rachel murmurec^ in obedience to her father's glance.

"We'll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley.
We think it an honour to have charge of him. Pepper'U have
some one to contradict him — which I daren't do. You find
this child grown, don't you? A young woman, eh?"

Still holding Helen's hand he drew his arm round Rachel's
shoulder, thus making them come uncomfortably close, but
Helen forbore to look.

"You think she does us credit?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," said Helen.

"Because we expect great things of her," he continued,
squeezing his daughter's arm and releasing her. "But about
you now." They sat down side by side on the little sofa.
"Did you leave the children well? They'll be ready for school,
I suppose. Do they take after you or Ambrose? They've got
good heads on their shoulders, I'll be bound?"

At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had
yet done, and explained that her son was six and her daughter
ten. Everybody said that her boy was like her and her girl
like Ridley. As for brains, they were quick brats, she thought,
and modestly she ventured on a little story about her son, —
how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat of butter
in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on the
fire — merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she
could understand.

"And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks
wouldn't do, eh ?"

"A child of six? I don't think they matter."

"I'm an old-fashioned father."

"Nonsense, Willoughby ; Rachel knows better."

Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daugh-
ter to praise him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as
water, her fingers still toying with the fossilised fish, her mind
absent. The elder people went on to speak of arrangements
that could be made for Ridley's comfort — a table placed

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where he couldn't help looking at the sea, far from boilers, at
the same time sheltered from the view of people passing. Un-
less he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed,
he would have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina
Helen knew, by experience, that he would work all day; his
boxes, she said, were packed with books.

"Leave it to me — ^leave it to me!" said Willoughby, obvi-
ously intending to do much more than she asked of him. But
Ridley and Mr. Pepper were heard fumbling at the door.

"How are you, Vinrace?" said Ridley, extending a limp
hand as he came in, as though the meeting were melancholy
to both, but on the whole more so to him.

Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect.
For the moment nothing was said.

"We looked in and saw you laughing," Helen remarked.
"Mr. Pepper had just told a very good story."

"Pish. None of the stories were good," said her husband
peevishly.

"Still a severe judge, Ridley?" enquired Mr. Vinrace.

"We bored you so that you left," said Ridley, speaking di-
rectly to his wife.

As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and
her next remark, "But didn't they improve after we'd gone?"
was unfortunate, for her husband answered with a droop of
his shoulders, "If possible they got worse."

The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for
every one concerned, as was proved by a long interval of con-
straint and silence. Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion
of a kind by leaping on to his seat, both feet tucked under
him, with the action of a spinster who detects a mouse, as
the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there, sucking at
his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked like
the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a dis-
course, addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it,
upon the unplunAed depths of ocean. He professed himself
surprised to learn that although Mr. Vinrace possessed ten
ships, regularly plying between London and Buenos Aires, not
one of them was bidden ta investigate the great white mon-
sters of the lower waters.

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"No, no," laughed Willoughby, "the monsters of the earth
are too many for me!"

Rachel was heard to sigh, "Poor little goats !"
. "If it weren't for the goats there'd be no music, my dear;
music depends upon goats," said her father rather sharply,
and Mr. Pepper went on to describe the white, hairless, blind
monsters lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of
the sea, which would explode if you brought them to the sur-
face, their sides bursting astmder and scattering entrails to
the winds when released from pressure, with considerable de-
tail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was dis-
gusted, and begged him to stop.

From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were
gloomy enough. Pepper was a bore ; Rachel was an unlicked
girl, no doubt prolific of confidences, the very first of which
would be: "You see, I don't get on with my father." Wil-
loughby, as usual, loved his business and built his Empire, and
between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a
woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her
part she was going to bed. At the door she glanced back in-
stinctively at Rachel expecting that as two of the same sex
they would leave the room together. Rachel rose, looked
vaguely into Helen's face and remarked with her slight stam-
mer, "I'm going out to t-t-triumph in the wind."

Mrs. Ambrose's worst suspicions were confirmed; she went
down the passage lurching from side to side, and fending off
the wall now with her right arm, now with her left ; at each
kirch she exclaimed emphatically, "Damn !"

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CHAPTER II

UNCOMFORTABLE as the night, with its rocking move-
ment, and salt smells, may have been, and in one case un-
doubtedly was, for Mr. Pepper had insufficient clothes upon
his bed, the breakfast next morning wore a kind of beauty.
The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue
sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things
to say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in future
years the entire journey perhaps would be represented by this
one scene, with the sound of sirens hooting in the river the
night before, somehow mixing in.

The table was cheerful with apples and bread and eggs.
Helen handed Willoughby the butter, and as she did so cast
her eye on him and reflected, "And she married you, and she
was happy, I suppose."

She went off on a familiar train of thought, leading on to
all kinds of well-known reflections, from the old wonder, why
Theresa had married Willoughby ?

"Of course, one sees all that," she thought, meaning that
one sees that he is big and burly, and has a great booming

voice, and a fist and a will of his own; "but " here she

slipped into a fine analysis of him which is best represented
by one word, "sentimental," by which she meant that he was
never simple and honest about his feelings. For example,
he seldom spoke of the dead, but kept anniversaries with sing-
ular pomp. She suspected him of nameless atrocities with
regard to his daughter, as indeed she had always suspected
him of bullying his wife. Naturally she fell to comparing her
own fortunes with the fortunes of her friend, for Willough-
by's wife had been perhaps the one woman Helen called
friend, and this comparison often made the staple of their
talk. Ridley was a scholar, and Willoughby was a man of
business. Ridley was bringing out the third volume of Pindar

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when Willoughby was launching his first ship. They built a
new factory the very year the commentary on Aristotle — ^was
it? — appeared at the University Press. "And Rachel," she
looked at her, meaning, no doubt, to decide the argument,
which was otherwise too evenly balanced, by declaring that
Rachel was not comparable to her own children. "She really
might be six years old," was all she said, however, this judg-
ment referring to the smooth unmarked outline of the girl's
face, and not condemning her otherwise, for if Rachel were
ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself, instead of drop-
ping milk from a height as though to see what kind of drops
it made, she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
She was like her mother, as the image in a pool on a still sum-
mer's day is like the vivid flushed face that hangs over it.

Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though
not from either of her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her;
and his meditations, carried on while he cut his toast into bars
and neatly buttered them, took him through a considerable
stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating glances as-
sured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen
was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was
talking nonsense, but not worse nonsense than people usually
do talk at breakfast, the cerebral circulation, as he knew to his
cost, being apt to give trouble at that hour. He went on say-
ing "No" to her, on principle, for he never )aelded to a
woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes
to his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married
himself for the sufficient reason that he had never met a
woman who commanded his respect. Condemned to pass the
susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay, he
had seen only coloured women, military women, official wo-
men ; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not
Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to
tmderstand the small things he let fall while undressing. As
it w^as he had contracted habits of which he was not in the
least ashamed. Certain odd minutes every day went to
learning things by heart; he never took a ticket without not-
ing the number; he devoted January to Petronius, February
to Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps ; anyhow he

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had done good work in India^ and there was nothing to regret
in his life except the fundamental defects which no wise man
regrets, when the present is still his. So concluding he looked
up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught his eye.

"And now you've chewed something thirty-seven times, I
suppose?" she thought, but said politely aloud, "Are your legs
troubling you to-day, Mr. Pepper?"

"My shoulder blades?" he asked, shifting them painfully.
"Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I'm aware of," he
sighed, contemplating the round pane opposite, through which
the sky and sea showed blue. At the same time he took a
little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it on the
table. As it was clear that he invited comment, Helen asked
him the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a
disquisition upon the proper method of making roads. Begin-
ning with the Greeks, who had, he said, many difficulties to
contend with, he continued with the Romans, passed to Eng-
land and the right method, which speedily became the wrong
method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation direct-
ed against the road-makers of the present day in general, and
the road-makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr.
Pepper had the habit of cycling every morning before break-
fast, that the spoons fairly jingled against the coffee cups, and
the insides of at least four rolls mounted in a heap beside Mr.
Pepper's plate.

"Pebbles!" he concluded, viciously dropping another bread
pellet upon the heap. "The roads of England are mended
with pebbles! 'With the first heavy rainfall,' I've told 'em,
*your road will be a swamp.' Again and again my words have
proved true. But d'you suppose they listen to me when I tell
'em so, when I point out the consequences, the consequences to
the public purse, when I recommend 'em to read Coryphaeus ?
Not a bit of it; they've other interests to attend to. No, Mrs.
Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the stupidity *bf
mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!" The
little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.

"I have had servants," said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating
her gaze. "At this moment I have a nurse. She's a good
woman as they go, but she's determined to make my children

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pray. So far, owing to great care on my part, they think of

God as a kind of walrus ; but now that my back's turned

Ridley," she demanded, swinging round upon her husband,
"what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord's Prayer
when we get home again ?"

Ridley made the sound which is represented by "Tush."

But Willoughby, whose discomfort as he listened was mani-
fested by a slight movement rocking of his body, said awk-
wardly, "Oh, surely, Helen, a little religion hurts nobody."

"I would rather my children told lies," she replied, and
while Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was
even more eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair
back and swept upstairs. In a second they heard her calling
back, "Oh, look! We're out at sea!"

They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the
houses had disappeared, and the ship w^ out in a wide space
of sea very fresh and clear though pale in the early light.
They had left London sitting on its mud. A very thin line of
shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand
the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested upon it. They
were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilara-
tion at their freedom ran through them all. The ship was
making her way steadily through small waves which slapped
her and then fizzled like effervescing water, leaving a little
border of bubbles and foam on either side. The colourless
October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail of
wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and brisk.
Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her
arm within her husband's, and as they moved off it could be
seen from the way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his
that she had something private to communicate. They went
a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.

Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was
slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the
Eupkrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dim-
mer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale
blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships,
or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great eels, or

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the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this
way and that.

"And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I'm busy till one,"

said her father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he
spoke to his daughter, by a smart Mow upon the shoulder.

"Until one," he repeated. "And you'll find yourself some
employment, eh? Scales, French, a little German, di?
There's Mr. Pepper who knows more about separable verbs
than any man in Europe, eh?" and he went off laughing.
Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she
could remember, without thinking it fimny, but because she
admired her father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding
some employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was
so broad and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevi-
table. The discreet tentative way in which she moved, together
with her sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the
lower orders; nevertheless she took up a rock-like position,
looking about her to see that no gentry were near before she
delivered her message, which had reference to the state of
the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.

"How ever we're to get through this voyage. Miss Rachel,
I really can't tell," she began with a shake of her head.
"There's only just sheets enough to go round, and the mas-
ter's has a rotten place you could put your fingers through.
And the counterpanes. Did you notice the counterpanes? I
thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed of
them. The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a
dog. . . . No, Miss Rachel, they could not be mended ; they're
only fit for dust sheets. Why, if one sewed one's finger to the
bone, one would have one's work undone the next time they
went to the laundry."

Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.

There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large
pile of linen heaped upon a table. Mrs. Chailey handled the
sheets as if she knew each by name, character, and constitu-
tion. Some had yellow stains, others had places where the
threads made long ladders; but to the ordinary eye they

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THE VOYAGE OUT «9

looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill, white, cold,
and irreproachably clean.

Suddenly Mrs. Qiailey, turning from the subject of sheets,
dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of
them, and proclaimed, "And you couldn't ask a living crea-
ture to sit where I sit I"

Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large
enough, but too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she
could hear her heart "go," she complained, putting her hand
above it, which was a state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Ra-
chel's mother, would never have dreamt of inflicting — Mrs.
Vinrace who knew every sheet in her house, and expected of
every one the best they could do, but no more.

It was the easiest thing in the world to grant another room,
and the problem of sheets simultaneously and miraculously
solved itself, the spots and ladders not being past cure after
all, but

*'Lies! Lies! Lies!" exclaimed the mistress indignantly,
as she ran up on to the deck. "What's the use of telling me
lies?"

In her anger that a woman of fifty should behave like a
child and come cringing to a g^rl because she wanted to sit
where she had not leave to sit, she did not think of the par-
ticular case, and, unpacking her music, soon forgot all about
the old woman and her sheets.

Mrs. Chailey folded her sheets, but her expression testified
to flatness within. The world no longer cared about her, and
a ship was not a home. When the lamps were lit yesterday,
and the sailors went tumbling above her head, she had cried ;
she would cry this evening; she would cry to-morrow. It was
not home. Meanwhile she arranged her ornaments in the
room which she had won too easily. They were strange or-
naments to bring on a sea voyage — china pugs, tea-sets in min-
iature, cups stamped floridly with the arms of the city of
Bristol, hair-pin boxes crusted with shamrock, antelopes'
heads in coloured plaster, together with a multitude of tiny
photographs, representing downright workmen in their Sun-
day best, and wpmen holding white babies. But there was
one portrait in a gilt frame, for which a nail was needed, and

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before she sought it Mrs. Qiailey put on her spectacles and
read what was written on a slip of paper at the back:

"This picture of her mistress is given to Emma Chailey by
Willoughby Vinrace in gratitude for thirty years of devoted
service."

Tears obliterated the words and the head of the nail.

"So long as I can do something for your family," she was
saying, as she hammered at it, when a voice called melodiously
in the passage.

"Mrs Chailey! Mrs. Oiailey!"

Chailey instantly tided her dress, composed her face, and
opened the door.

"I'm in a fix," said Mrs. Ambrose, who was flushed and
out of breath. "You know what gentlemen are. The chairs
too high — ^the tables too low — there's six inches between the
floor and the door. What I want's a hammer, an old qplt,
and have you such a thing as a kitchen table? Anyhow, be-
tween us" she now flung open the door of her husband's

sitting-room, and revealed Ridley pacing up and down, his
forehead all wrinkled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

"It's as though they'd taken pains to torment me !" he cried,
stopping dead. "Did I come on this voyage in order to catch
rheumatism and pneumonia ? Really one might have credited
Vinrace with more sense. My dear," Helen was on her knees
under a table, "you are only making yourself untidy, and we
had much better recognise the fact that we are condemned to
six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the
height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can
face it like a man. My diseases of course will be increased —
I feel already worse than I did yesterday, but we've only our-
selves to thank, and the children happily "

"Move! Move! Move!" cried Helen, chasing him from
comer to comer with a chair as though he were an errant
hen. "Out of the way, Ridley, and in half an hour you'll find
it ready."

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him
groaning and swearing as he went along the passage.

"I daresay he isn't very strong," said Mrs. Chailey, looking

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at Mrs. Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and
carry.

"It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes
from the floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning to night.
If ever Miss Rachel marries, Chailey, pray that she may
marry a man who doesn't know his ABC."

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which gener-
ally make the first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying
to the temper, being somehow lived through, the succeeding
days passed pleasantly enough. October was well advanced,
but steadily burning with a warmth that made the early
months of the summer appear very young and capricious.
Great tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun,
and the whole of England, from the bald moors to the Corn-
ish rocks, was lit up from dawn to sunset, and showed in
stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under that illumina-
tion even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In thousands
of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came
down the paths with their scissors, snipped through their
juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the vil-
lage church. Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home
at sunset cried, "Was there ever such a day as this?" "It's
you," the young men whispered ; "Oh, it's you," the young
women replied. All old people and many sick people were
drawn, were it only for a foot or two, into the open air, and
prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world.
As for the confidences and expressions of love that were
heard not only in cornfields but in lamplit rooms, where the
windows opened on the garden, and men with cigars kissed
women with grey hairs, they were not to be counted. Some
said that the sky was an emblem of the life they had had;
others that it was the promise of the life to come. Long-
tailed birds clattered and screamed, and crossed from wood
to wood, with golden eyes in their plumage.

But while all this went on by land, very few people thought
about the sefei. They took it for granted that the sea was
calm ; and there was no need, as there is in many houses when
the creeper taps on the bedroom windows, for the couples

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to murmur before they kiss, "Think of the ships to-night/' or
"Thank Heaven, I'm not the man in the lighthouse !" For all
they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-Kne
dissolved, like snow in water. The grown-up view, indeed,
was not much clearer than the view of the little creatures in
bathing drawers who were trotting in to the foam all along
the coasts of England, and scooping up buckets full of water.
They saw white sails or tufts of smoke pass across the hori-
zon, and if you had said that these were waterspouts, or the
petals of white sea flowers, they would have agreed.

The people in ships, however, took an equally singular view
of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island,
and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which
people were imprisoned. One figured them first swarming
about like aimless ants, and almost pressing each other over
the edge; and then, as the ship withdrew, one figured them
making a vain clamour, which, being unheard, either ceased,
or rose into a brawl. Finally, when the ship was out of sight
of land, it became plain that the people of England were
completely mute. The disease attacked other parts of the
earth; Europe shrank, Asia shrank, Africa and America
shrank, until it seemed doubtful whether the ship would ever
run against any of those wrinkled little rocks again. But, on
the other hand, an immense dignity had descended upon her ;
she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few
inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with
veils drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely
than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more
mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her
own resources. The sea might give her death or some unex-
ampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride
going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men ; in her
vigour and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things,
worshipped and felt as a symbol.

Indeed if they had not been blessed in their weather, one
blue day being bowled up after another, smooth, round, and
flawless. Mrs. Ambrose would have found it very dull. As
it was, she had her embroidery frame set up on deck, with a
little table by her side on which lay open a black volume of

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THE VOYAGE OUT 88

philosophy. She chose a thread from the vari-coloured tangle
that lay in her lap, and sewed red into the bark of a tree, or
yellow into the river torrenf. She was working at a great
design of a tropical river running through a tropical forest,
where spotted deer would eventually browse upon masses of
fruit, bananas, oranges, and giant pomegranates, while a troop
of naked natives whirled darts into the air. Between the
stitches she looked to one side and read a sentence about the
Reality of Matter, or the Nature of Good. Round her men
in blue jerseys knelt and scrubbed the boards, or leant over the
rails and whistled, and not far off Mr. Pepper sat cutting up
roots with a penknife. The rest were occupied in other parts
of the ship: Ridley at his Greek — ^he had never found quar-
ters more to his Kking; Willoughby at his documents, for he
used a voyage to work off arrears of business ; and Rachel —
Helen, between her sentences of philosophy, wondered some-
times what Rachel did do with herself? She meant vaguely
to go and see. They had scarcely spoken two words to each
other since that first evening; they were polite when they
met, but there had been no confidence of any kind. Rachel
seemed to get on very well with her father — ^much better,
Helen thought, than she ought to — ^and was as ready to let
Helen alone as Helen was to let her alone.

At that moment Rachel was sitting in her room doing abso-
lutely nothing. When the ship was full this apartment bore
some magnificent title and was the resort of elderly sea-sick
ladies who left the deck to their youngers. By virtue of the
piano, and a mess of books on the floor, Rachel considered
it her room, and there she would sit for hours playing very
difficult music, reading a little German, or a little English
when the mood took her, and doing — ^as at this moment — ^abso-
lutely nothing.

The way she had been educated, joined to a fine natural
indolence, was of course partly the reason of it, for she had
been educated as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last
part of the nineteenth century were educated. Kindly doctors
and gentle old professors had taught her the rudiments of
about ten different branches of knowledge, but they would
as soon have forced her to go through one f'^ece of drudgery

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thoroughly as they would have told her that her hands were
dirty. The one hour or the two hours weekly passed very
pleasantly, partly owing to the fact that the window looked
upon the back of a shop, where figures appeared against the
red windows in winter, partly to the accidents that are bound
to happen when more than two people are in the same room
together. But there was no subject in the world which she
knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelli-
gent man's in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth;
she would believe practically anything she was told, invent
reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the
history of the world, how trains worked, or money was in-
vested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what,
and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a sys-
tem in modem life — ^none of this had been imparted to her
by any of her professors or mistresses. But this system of
education had one great advantage. It did not teach any-
thing, but it put no obstacle in the way of any real talent that
the pupil might chance to have. Rachel, being musical, was al-
lowed to learn nothing but music ; she became a fanatic about
music. All the energies that might have gone into languages,
science, or literature, that might have made her friends, or
shown her the world, poured straight into music. Finding
her teachers inadequate, she had practically taught herself.
At the age of twenty-four she knew as much about music as
most people do when they are thirty; and could play as well
as nature intended her to, which, as became daily more obvi-
ous, was a really generous allowance. If this one definite gift
was surrounded by dreams and ideas of the most extravagant
and foolish description, no one was any the wiser.

Her education being thus ordinary, her circumstances were
no more out of the common. She was an only child and had
never been bullied and laughed at by brothers and sisters. Her
mother having died when she was eleven, two aunts, the sis-
ters of her father, brought her up, and they lived for the sake
of the air in a comfortable house in Richmond. She was of
course brought up with excessive care, which as a child was
for her health ; as a girl and a young woman for what it seems
almost crude ta^call her morals, Until quite lately she had

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been completely ignorant that for women such things existed.
She groped for knowledge in old books, and found it in re-
pulsive chunks, but she did not naturally care for books and
thus never troubled her head about the censorship which was
exercised first by her aunts, later by her father. Friends
might have told her things, but she had few of her own age,
— Richmond being an awkward place to reach, — ^and, as it
happened, the only girl she knew well was a religious zealot,
who in the fervour of intimacy talked about God, and the best
ways of taking up one's cross, a topic only fitfully interesting
to one whose mind reached other stages at other times.

But lying in her chair, with one hand behind her head, the
other grasping the knob on the arm, she was clearly follow-
ing her thoughts intently. Her education left her abundant
time for thinking. Her eyes were fixed so steadily upon a
ball on the rail of the ship that she would have been startled
and annoyed if anything had chanced to obscure it for a
second. She had begim her meditations with a shout of
laughter, caused by the following translation from Tristan:

In shrinking trepidation
His shame he seems to hide
While to the king his relation
He brings the corpse-like Bride.
Seems it so senseless what I say?

She cried that it did, and threw down the book. Next she had
picked up Cowper^s Letters, the classic prescribed by her father
which had bored her, so that one sentence chancing to say
something about the smell of broom in his garden, she had
thereupon seen the little hall at Richmond laden with flowers
on the day of her mother's funeral, smelling so strong that
now any flower-scent brought back the sickly horrible sensa-
tion; and so from one scene she passed, half-hearing, half-
seeing, to another. She saw her Aunt Lucy arranging flowers
in the drawing-room.

"Aimt Lucy," she volunteered, "I don't like the smell of
broom ; it reminds me of funerals."

''Nonsense, Rachel," Aunt Lucy replied; "don't say such

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foolish things, dear. I always think it a particularly cheer-
ful plant."

Ijying in the hot sun her mind was fixed upon the char-
acters of her aunts, their views, and the way they lived. In-
deed this was a subject that lasted her hundreds of morn-
ing walks round Richmond Park, and blotted out the trees and
the people and the deer. Why did they do the things they
did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?
Again she heard Aunt Lucy talking to Aunt Eleanor. She
had been that morning to take up the character of a servant,
"And, of course, at half-past ten in the morning one expects
to find the housemaid brushing the stairs." How odd! How
unspeakably odd ! But she could not explain to herself why
suddenly as her aunt spoke the whole system in which they
lived had appeared before her eyes as something quite un-
familiar and inexplicable, and themselves as chairs or um-
brellas dropped about here and there without any reason. She
could only say with her slight stammer, "Are you f-f-fond of
Aunt Eleanor, Aunt Lucy?*' to which her aunt replied, with
her nervous hen-like twitter of a laugh, "My dear child, what
questions you do ask !"

"How fond? Very fond?'' Rachel pursued.

"I can't say I've ever thought 'how,'" said Miss Vinrace.
"If one cares one doesn't think 'how,' Rachel," which was
aimed at the niece who had never yet "come" to her aunts as
cordially as they wished.

"But you know I care for you, don't you, dear, because
you're your mother's daughter, if for no other reason, and
there are plenty of other reasons" — and she leant over and
kissed her with some emotion, and the argument was spilt
irretrievably about the place like the proverbial bucket of milk.

By these means Rachel reached that stage in thinking, if
thinking it can be called, when the eyes are intent upon a ball
or a knob and the lips cease to move. Her efforts to come
to an understanding had only hurt her aunt's feelings, and the
conclusion must be that it is better not to try. To feel any-
thing strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and
others who feel strongly perhaps but differently. It was
far better to play the iriano and forget all the rest. The con-

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elusion was very welcome. Let these odd men and women —
her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest
-^e symbols, — featureless but dignified, symbols of age, of
youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as
people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared that nobody
ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they
felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in
what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could ac-
cept a system in which things went round and round quite^
satisfactorily to other people, without often troubling to think
about it, except as something superficially strange. Absorbed
by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing
into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she
subsided now. Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her
mind seemed to enter into communion, to be delightfully ex-
panded and combined, with the spirit of the whitish boards
on deck, with the spirit of the sea, with the spirit of Bee-
thoven Op. Ill, even with the spirit of poor William Cowper
there at Olney. Like a ball of thistledown it kissed the sea,
rose, kissed it again, and thus rising and kissing passed finally
out of sight. The rising and falling of the ball of thistledown
was represented by the sudden droop forward of her own head,
and when it passed out of sight she was asleep.

Ten minutes later Mrs. Ambrose opened the door and
looked at her. It did not surprise her to find that this was
the way in which Rachel passed her mornings. She glanced
round the room at the piano, at the books, at the general mess.
In the first place she considered Rachel aesthetically; lying
unprotected she looked somehow like a victim dropped from
the daws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman,
a young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflec-
tions. Mrs. Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes.
She then smiled, turned noiselessly and went, lest the sleeper
should waken, and there should be the awkwardness of speech
between them.

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CHAPTER III

EARLY next morning there was a sound as of chains being
drawn roughly overhead; the steady heart of the
Euphrosyne slowly ceased to beat; and Helen, poking her
nose above deck, saw a stationary castle upon a stationary
hill. They had dropped anchor in the mouth of the Tagus,
and instead of cleaving new waves perpetually, the same waves
kept returning and washing against the sides of the ship.

As soon as breakfast was done, Willoughby disappeared
over the vessel's side, carrying a brown leather case, shouting
over his shoulder that every one was to mind and behave
themselves, for he would be kept in Lisbon doing business
until five o'clock that afternoon.

At about that hour he reappeared, carr)ring his case, pro-
fessing himself tired, bothered, hungry, thirsty, cold, and in
immediate need of his tea. Rubbing his hands, he told them
the adventures of the day: how he had come upon poor old
Jackson combing his moustache before the glass in the office,
little expecting his descent, had put him through such a morn-
ing's work as seldom came his way; then treated him to a
lunch of champagne and ortolans; paid a call upon Mrs.
Jackson, who was fatter than ever, poor woman, but asked
kindly after Rachel — ^and O Lord, little Jackson had confessed
to a confounded piece of weakness — ^well, well, no harm was
done, he supposed, but what was the use of his giving orders
if they were promptly disobeyed? He had 5?aid distinctly
that he would take no passengers on this trip. Here he began
searching in his pockets and eventually discovered a card,
which he planked down on the table before Rachel. On
it she read, **Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23 Browne
Street, Mayfair."

"Mr. Richard Dalloway,*' continued Vinrace, "seems to be'
a g^nthmm who thinks that because he was once a member

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of Parliament, and his wife's the daughter of a peer, they
can have what they like for the asking. They got round poor
little Jackson pnyhow. Said they must have passages —
produced a letter from Lord Glenaway, asking me as a per-
sonal favour — overruled any objections Jackson made (I
don't believe they came to much), and so there's nothing for
it but to submit, I suppose."

But it was evident that for some reason or other Willoughby
was quite pleased to submit, although he made a show of
growling.

The truth was that Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway had found
themselves stranded in Lisbon. They had been travelling on
the Continent for some weeks, chiefly with a view to broad-
enfng Mr. Dalloway's mind. Unable for a season, by one of
the accidents of political life, to serve his country in Parlia-
ment, Mr. Dalloway was doing the best he could to serve it out
of Parhament. For that purpose the Latin countries did very
well, although the East, of course, would have done better.

"Expect to hear of me next in Petersburg or Teheran," he
had said, turning to wave farewell from the steps of the
Travellers'. But a disease had broken out in the East, there
was cholera in Russia, and he was heard of, not so roman-
tically, in Lisbon. They had been through France; he had
stopped at manufacturing centres where, producing letters of
introduction, he had been shown over works, and noted facts
in a pocket-book. In Spain he and Mrs. Dalloway had
mounted mules, for they wished to understand how the
peasants live. Are they, for example, ripe for rebellion ? Mrs.
Dalloway had then insisted upon a day or two at Madrid
with the pictures. Finally they arrived in Lisbon and spent
six days which, in a journal privately issued afterwards,
they described as of "unique interest." Richard had audiences
with ministers, and foretold a crisis at no distant date, **the
foundations of government being incurably corrupt. Yet
how blame, etc."; while Clarissa inspected the royal stables,
and took several snapshots showing men now exiled and
windows now broken. Among other things she photographed
Fielding's grave, and let loose a small bird which some
rufHan had trapped, "because one hates to think of anything in

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a cage where English people lie buried/' the diary stated.
Their tour was thoroughly unconventional, and followed no
meditated plan. The foreign correspondents of the Time^
decided their route as much as anything else. Mr. Dalloway
wished to look at certain g^ns, and was of opinion that the
African coast is far more unsettled than people at home were
inclined to believe. For these reasons they wanted a slow
inquisitive kind of ship, comfortable, for they were bad sail-
ors, but not extravagant, which would stop for a day or two
at this port and at that, taking in coal while the Palloways
saw things for themselves. Meanwhile they found them-
selves stranded in Lisbon, unable for the moment to lay hands
upon the precise vessel they wanted. They heard of the
Euphrosyne, but heard also that she was primarily a cargD
boat, and only took passengers by special arrangement, her
business being to carry dry goods to the Amazons, and rubber
home again. "By special arrangement," however, were words
of high encouragement in their ears, for they came of a class
where almost everything was specially arranged, or could
be if necessary. On this occasion all that Richard did was
to write a note to Lord Glenaway, the head of the line which
bears his title ; to call on poor old Jackson ; to represent to him
how Mrs. Dalloway was so-and-so, and he had been something
or other else, and what they wanted was such and such a
thing. It was done. They parted with compliments and pleas-
ure on both sides, and here, a week later, came the boat
rowing up to the ship in the dusk with the Dalloways on
board of it; in three minutes they were standing together
on the deck of the Euphrosyne, Their arrival, of course,
created some stir, and it was seen by several pairs of eyes
that Mrs. Dalloway was a tall slight woman, her body wrapped
in furs, her head in veils, while Mr. Dalloway appeared to be
a middle-sized man of sturdy build, dressed like a sportsman
on an autumnal moor. Many solid leather bags of a rich
brown hue soon surrounded them, in addition to which Mr.
Dalloway carried a despatch box, and his wife a dressii^-
case suggestive of diamond necklaces and bottles with silver
tops.
"It's so like Whistler !" she exclaimed, with a wave towards

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the shore, as she shook Rachel by the hand, and Rachel had
only time to look at the grey hills on one side of her before
Willoughby introduced Mrs. Chailey, who took the lady to
her cabin.

Momentary though it seemed, nevertheless the interruption
was upsetting; every one was more or less put out by it,
from Mr. Grice, the steward, to Ridley himself. A few
minutes later Rachel passed the smoking-room, and found
Helen moving arm-chairs. She was absorbed in her rear-
rangements, and on seeing Rachel remarked confidentially :

"If one can give men a room to themselves where they
will sit, it's all to the good. Arm-chairs are the important

things " She began wheeling them about. "Now, does

it still look like a bar at a railway station?"

She whipped a plush cover off a table. TEe appearance
of the place was marvellously improved.

Again, the arrival of the strangers made it obvious to
Rachel, as the hour of dinner approached, that she must
change. her dress; and the ringing of the great bell found her
sitting on the edge of her berth in such a position that the
little glass above the washstand reflected her head and
shoulders. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melan-
choly, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since
the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face
she wanted, and in all probability never would be..

However, punctuality had been impressed on her, and
whatever face she had, she must go in to dinner with it.

These few minutes had been used by Willoughby in sketch-
ing to the Dalloways the people they were to meet, and
checking them upon his fingers.

"There's my brother-in-law, Ambrose, the scholar (I dare-
say you've heard his name), his wife, my old friend Pepper,
a very quiet fellow, but knows everything, I'm told. And
that's all. We're a very small party. I'm dropping them on
the coast."

Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her
best to recollect Ambrose — ^was it a surname? — ^but failed.
She was made slightly uneasy by what she had heard. She
knew that scholars married any one — ^girls they met in farms

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on reading parties; or little suburban women who said dis-
agreeably, "Of course I know it's my husband you want;
not me!'

But Helen came in at that point, and Mrs. Dalloway saw
with relief that though slightly eccentric in appearance, she
was not untidy, held herself well, and her voice had restraint
in it, which she held to be the sign of a lady. Mr. Pepper
had not troubled to change his neat ugly suit.

"But after all," Clarissa thought to herself as she followed
Vinrace in to dinner, "every one's interesting really."

When seated at the table she had some need of that assur-
ance, chiefly because of Ridley, who came in late, looked
decidedly unkempt, and/took to his soup in profound gloom.

An imperceptible signal passed between husband and wife,
meaning that they grasped the situation and would stand by
each other loyally. With scarcely a pause Mrs. Dalloway
turned to Willoughby and began:

"What I find so tiresome about the sea is that there are no
flowers in it. Imagine fields of hollyhocks and violets in
mid-ocean! How divine!"

"But somewhat dangerous to navigation," boomed Richard,
in the bass, like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife's violin.
**Why, weeds can be bad enough, can't they, Vinrace? I
remember crossing in the Mauretcmia once, and saying to the
Captain — Richards — did you know him? — ^*Now tell me what
perils you really dread most for your ship. Captain Richards?*
expecting him to say icebergs, or derelicts, or fog, or some-
thing of that sort. Not a bit of it. I've always remembered
his answer. 'Sedgius aquatici,' he said, which I take to be a
kind of duck-weed."

Mr. Pepper looked up sharply, and was about to put a
question when Willoughby continued:

"They've an awful time of it — ^those captains! Three
thousand souls on board!"

"Yes, indeed," said Clarissa. She turned to Helen with an
air of profundity. "Fm convinced people are wrong when
they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility. That's
why one pays one's cook more than one's housemaid, I sup-
pose."

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** According to that, one ought to pay one's nurse double;
but one doesn't," said Helen.

"No; but think what a joy to have to do with babies,
instead of saucepans!" said Mrs. Dalloway, looking with
more interest at Helen, a probable mother.

"I'd much rather be a cook than a nurse," said Helen.
•'Nothing would induce me to take charge of children."

"Mothers always exaggerate," said Ridley. "A well-bred
child is no responsibility. I've travelled all over Europe
with mine. You just wrap 'em up warm and put 'em in
the rack."

Helen laughed at that. Mrs. Dalloway exclaimed, looking
at Ridley:

"How like a father! My husband's just the same. And
then one talks of the equality of the sexes!"

"Does one?" said Mr. Pepper.

"Oh, some do !" cried Clarissa. "My husband had to pass
an irate lady every afternoon last session who said nothing
else, I imagine."

"She sat outside the house; it was very awkward," said
Dalloway. "At last I plucked up courage and said to her,
'My good creature, you're only in the way where you are.
You're hindering me, and you're doing no good to yourself.' "

"And then she caught him by the coat, and would have
scratched his eyes out " Mrs. Dalloway put in.

"Pooh — ^that's been exaggerated," said Richard. "No, I
pity them, I confess. The discomfort of sitting on those
steps must be awful."

"Serve them right," said Willoughby curtly.

"Oh, I'm entirely with you there," said Dalloway. "Nobody
can condemn the utter folly and futility of such behaviour
more than I do; and as for the whole agitation, well! may
I be in my grave before a woman has the right to vote in
England! That's all I say."

The solemnity of her husband's assertion made Clarissa
grave.

"It's unthinkable," she said. "Don't tell me you're a
suflFragist?" she turned to Ridley.

"I don't care a fig one way or t'other," said Ambrose. "If

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any creature is so deluded as to think that a vote does him
or her any good, let him have it. He'll soon learn better/'

"You're not a politician, I see," she smiled.

"Goodness, no," said Ridley.

"I'm afraid your husband won't approve of me," said Dallo-
way aside, to Mrs. Ambrose. She suddenly recollected that
he had been in Parliament.

"Don't you ever find it rather dull?" she asked, not know-
ing exactly what to say.

Richard spread his hands before him, as if insctipticms
bearing on what she asked him were to be read in the palms
of them.

"If you ask me whether I ever find it rather dull," he said,
"I am bound to say yes; on the other hand, if you ask me
what career do you consider on the whole, taking the good
with the bad, the most enjoyable and enviable, not to speak
of its more serious side, of all careers, for a man, I am
bound to say, 'The Politician's.'"

"The Bar or politics, I agree," said Willoughby. "You get
more run for your money."

"All one's faculties have their play," said Richard. "I may
be treading on dangerous ground ; but what I feel about poets
and artists in general is this : on your own lines, you can't be
beaten — granted; but off your own lines — ^puff — one has to
make allowances. Now, I shouldn't like to think that any one
had to make allowances for me."

"I don't quite agree, Richard," said Mrs. Dalloway. "Think
of Shelley. I feel that there's almost everything one wants in
'Adonais.' "

"Read *Adonais' by all means," Richard conceded. **Buf
whenever I hear of Shelley I repeat to myself the words of
Matthew Arnold, 'What a set! What a set!' "

This roused Ridley's attention. "Matthew Arnold? A de-
testable prig !" he snapped.

"A prig — granted," said Richard; *T>ut, I think, a man of
the world. That's where my point comes in. We politicians
doubtless seem to you" (he had grasped somehow that Helen
was the representative of the arts) "a gross commonplace set
of people ; but we see both sides ; we may be clumsy, but we

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do our best to get a grasp of things. Now your artists find
things in a mess, shrug their shoulders, turn aside to their
visions — which I grant may be very beautiful — and le<Pi/e
things in a mess. Now that seems to me evading one's re-
sponsibilities. Besides, we aren't all bom with the artistic
faculty."

"It's dreadful," said Mrs. Dalloway, who, while her hus-
band spoke, had been thinking. "When I'm with artists I feel
so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world
of one's own, with pictures and music and everything beauti-
ful, and then I go out into the streets and the first child I
meet with its poor, hungry, dirty little face makes me turn
round and say, 'No, I can't shut myself up — I won't live in a
world of my own. I should like to stop all the painting and
writing and music until this kind of thing exists no longer.'
Don't you feel," she wound up, addressing Helen, "that life's
a i)erpetual conflict?"

Helen considered for a moment. "No," she said "I don't
think I do."

There was a pause, which was decidedly uncomfortable.
Mrs. Dalloway then gave a little shiver, and asked whether
she might have her fur cloak brought to her. As she adjusted
the soft brown fur about her neck a fresh topic struck her.

"I own," she said, "that I shall never forget the Antigone,
I saw it at Cambridge years ago, and it's haunted me ever
since. Don't you think it's quite the most modem thing you
ever saw?" she asked Ridley. "It seemed to me I'd known
twenty Ojrtemnestras. Old Lady Ditchling for one. I don't
know a word of Greek, but I could listen to it for ever "

Here Mr, Pepper struck up :

iroXXd rd deivSi, KoiSh diN-
6p6)TOv Buv&repov wkXei,
Tovro Kal iroXiov wkpav

X<*^P^h 7r€pt/3pi;x^t<^*
irepQv iv otdfiaai,

Mrs. Dalloway looked at him with compressed lips.
"I'd give ten years of my life to know Greek," she said,
when he had done.

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"I could teach you the alphabet in half an hour/' said Rid-
ley, "and you'd read Homer in a month. I should think it an
honour to instruct you."

Helen, engaged with Mr. Dalloway .,and the habit, now
fallen into decline, of quoting Greek in the House of Coror
mons, noted, in the great commonplace book that lies open
beside us as wc talk, the fact that all men, even men like Rid-
ley, really prefer women to be fashionable.

Qarissa exclaimed that she could think of nothing more de-
lightful. For an instant she saw herself in her drawing-room
in Browne Street with a Plato open on her knees — Plato in the
original Greek. She could not help believing that a real
scholar, if specially interested, could slip Greek into her head
with scarcely any trouble.

Ridley engaged her to come to-morrow.

**If only your ship is going to treat us kindly!'* she ex-
claimed, drawing Willoughby into play. For the sake of
guests^ and these were distinguished, Willoughby was ready
with a bow of his head to vouch for the good behaviour even
of the waves.

"I'm dreadfully bad; and my husband's not very good,"
sighed Clarissa.

"I am never sick," Richard explained, "At least, I have
only been actually sick once," he corrected himself. "That
was crossing the Qiannel. But a choppy sea, I confess, or
still worse, a swell, makes me distinctly uncomfortable. The
great thing is never to miss a meal. You look at the food,
and you say, *I can't' ; you take a mouthful, and Lord knows
how you're going to swallow it ; but persevere, and you often
settle the attack for good. My wife's a coward."

They were pushing back their chairs. The ladies were hes-
itating at the doorway.

"I'd better show the way," said Helen, advancing.

Rachel followed. She had taken no part in the talk; no
one had spoken to her; but she had listened to every word
that was said. She had looked from Mrs. Dalloway to Mr.
Dalloway, and from Mr. Dalloway back again. Qarissa, in-
deed, was a fascinating spectacle. She wore a white dress
and a long glittering necklace. What with her clothes, and

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her arch delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath
hair turning grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-
century masterpiece — 2l Reynolds or a Romney. She made
Helen and the others look coarse and slovenly beside her.
Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing with the world
as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this way
and that beneath her fingers. And her husband ! Mr. Dallo-
way rolling that rich deliberate voice was even more impres-
sive. He seemed to come from the humming oily centre of
the machine where the polished rods are sliding, and the pis-
tons thumping; he grasped things so^firmly but so loosely; he
made the others appear like old maids cheapening remnants.
Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance ;
a curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway,
mingling with the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling
of her chains. As she followed, Rachel thought with su-
preme self-abasement, taking in the whole course of her life
and the lives of all her friends, "She said we lived in a world
of our own. It's true. We're perfectly absurd."

**We sit in here," said Helen, opening the door of the saloon.

"You play?" said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking
up the score of Tristan which lay on the table.

"My niece does," said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel's
shoulder.

"Oh, how I envy you!" Clarissa addressed Rachel for the
first time. "D'you remember this? Isn't it divine?" She
played a bar or two with ringed fingers upon the page.

'*And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde! Have you
been to Bayreuth?"

"No, I haven't," said Rachel.

*^Then that's still to come. I shall never forget my first
Parsifal — a grilling August day, and those fat old German
women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark
theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn't help sob-
bing. A kind man went and fetched me water, I remember;
and I could only cry on his shoulder! It caught me here"
(she touched her throat). "It's like nothing else in the world !
But where's your piano?"

"It's in another room," Rachel explained.

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"But you will play to us?** Clarissa entreated. "I can't
imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and
listen to music — only that sounds too like a schoolgirl ! You
know," she said, turning to Helen a little mysteriously, "I
don't think music's altogether good for people — ^I'm afraid
not."

"Too great a strain?" asked Helen.

"Too emotional," said Clarissa. "One notices it at once
when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession. Sir Wil-
liam Broadley told me just the same thing. Don't you hate
the kind of attitudes people go into over Wagner — ^like this — **
She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and as-
sumed a look of intensity. "It really doesn't mean that they
appreciate him; in fact, I always think it's the other way
round. The people who really care about an art are always
the least affected. D'you know Henry Philips, the painter?"
she asked.

"I have seen him," said Helen.

"To look at, one might think he was a successful stock-
broker, and not one of the greatest painters of the age. That's
what I like."

"There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you
like looking at them," said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so'
perverse.

"When you see a musician with long hair, don't you know
instinctively that he's bad?" Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel.
"Watts and Joachim — they looked just like you and me."

"And how much nicer they'd have looked with curls !" said
Helen. "The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or
are you not?"

"Qeanliness !" said Clarissa, "I do want a man to look
clean!"

"By cleanliness you mean well-cut clothes," said Helen.

"There's something one knows a gentleman by," said Clar-
issa, "but one can't say what it is."

"Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?**
V The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad

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taste. "One of the things that can't be said/* she would have
put it. She could find no answer, but a laugh.

"Well, anyhow," she said, turning to Rachel, "I shall insist
upon your playing to me to-morrow/*

There was that in her manner that made Rachel love her.

Mrs. Dalloway hid a tiny yawn, a mere dilation of the
nostrils.

"D'you know," she said, "I'm extraordinarily sleepy. It's
the sea air. I think I shall escape/'

A man's voice, which she took to be that of Mr. Pepper,
strident in discussion, and advancing upon the saloon, gave
her the alarm.

"Good-night — good-^iight !" she said. "Oh, I know my way
—do pray for calm! Good-night 1"

Her yawn must have been the image of a yawn. Instead
of letting her mouth droop, dropping all her clothes in a
bunch as though they depended on one string, and stretching
her limbs to the utmost end of her berth, she merely changed
her dress for a dressing-gown, with innumerable frills, and
wrapping her feet in a rug, sat down with a writing-pad on
her knee. Already this cramped little cabin was the dressing-
room of a lady of quality. There were bottles containing
liquids ; there were trays, boxes, brushes, pins. Evidently not
* an inch of her person lacked its proper instrument. The scent
which had intoxicated Rachel pervaded the air. Thus estab-
lished, Mrs. Dalloway began to write. A pen in her hands
became a thing one caressed paper with, and she might have
been stroking and tickling a kitten as she wrote : ^

Picture us, my dear, afloat in the very oddest ship you can
imagine. It's not the ship, so much as the people. One
does come across queer sorts as one travels. I must say I
find it hugely amusing. There's the manager of the line —

So she wrote on, filling sheets and smiling as she filled them,
until the door opened.

"You coward 1" said Richard, ahnost filling the room with
his sturdy figure.

**I did my duty at dinner !" cried Clarissa.

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"You've let yourself in for the Greek alphabet, anyhow.**

"Oh, my dear! Who is Ambrose?"

"I gather that he was a Cambridge don; lives in London
now, and edits classics."

"Did you ever see such a set of cranks ? The woipan asked
me if I thought her husband looked like a gentleman !"

"It was hard to keep the ball rolling at dinner, certainly/'
said Richard. "Why is it that the women, in that class, are so
much queerer than the men ?"

"They're not half bad-looking, really — only — ^they're so
odd!"

They both laughed, thinking of the same things, so that
there was no need to compare their impressions.

"I see I shall have quite a lot to say to Vinrace," said
Richard. "He knows Sutton and all that set. He can tell me
a good deal about the conditions of shipbuilding in the North."

"Oh, I'm glad. The men always are so much better than
the women."

"One always has something to say to a man certainly," said
Richard. "But I've no doubt you'll chatter away fast enough
about the babies, Qarice."

"Has she got children ? She doesn't look like it somehow.'*

"Two. A boy and girl."

A pang of envy shot through Mrs. Dalloway's heart.

"We must have a son, Dick," she said.

"Good Lord, what opportunities there are now for young
men!" said Dalloway, for his talk had set him thinking. "I
don't suppose there's been so good an opening since the days
of Pitt."

"And it's yours !" said Clarissa.

"To be a leader of men," Richard soliloquised. "It's a fine
career. My God — what a career!"

The chest slowly curved beneath his waistcoat.

"D'you know, Dick, I can't help thinking of England," said
his wife meditatively, leaning her head against his chest.
''Being on this ship seems to make it so much more vivid —
what it means to be English. One thinks of all we've done,
and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how
we've gone on century after century, sending out boys from

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little country villages — and of men like you, Dick, and it
makes one feel as if one couldn't bear not to be English I
Think of the light burning over the House, Dick! When I
stood on deck just now I seemed to see it. It's what one
means by London.

"It's tfie continuity," said Richard sententiously. A vision
of English history, King following King, Prime Minister
Prime Minister, and Law Law had come over him while his
wife spoke. He ran his mind along the line of conservative
policy, which went steadily from Lord Salisbury to Alfred,
and gradually enclosed, as though it were a lasso that opened
and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe.

"It's taken a long time, but we've pretty nearly done it,"
he said ; "it remains to consolidate."

"And these people don't see it!" Qarissa exclaimed.

*'It takes all sorts to make a world," said her husband.
"There would never be a government if there weren't an op-
position."

*T)ick, you're better than I am," said Clarissa. "You see
round, where I only see there!' She pressed a point on the
back of his hand.

"That's my business, as I tried to explain at dinner."

"What I like about you, Dick," she continued, "is that
you're always the same, and I'm a creature of moods."

"You're a pretty creature, anyhow," he said, gazing at her
with deeper eyes.

"You think so, do you ? Then kiss me."

He kissed her passionately, so that her half-written letter
slid to the groimd. Picking it up, he read it without asking
leave.

"Where's your pen?" he said; and added in his little mas-
culine hand :

R. D. loquitur: Qarice has omitted to tell you that she
looked exceedingly pretty at dinner, and made a conquest by
which she has bound herself to learn the Greek alphabet. I
will take this occasion of adding that we are both enjoying
ourselves in these putlJtndish parts, and only wish for the

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presence of our friends (yourself and John, to wit) to make
the trip perfectly enjoyable as it promises to be instructive. . . .

Voices were heard at the end of the corridor. Mrs. Am-
brose was speaking low; William Pepper was remarking in
his definite and rather acid voice, "That is the type of lady
with whom I find myself distinctly out of sympathy. She "

But neither Richard nor Qarissa profited by the verdict, for
directly it seemed likely that they would overhear, Richard
crackled a sheet of paper.

"I often wonder," Clarissa mused in bed, over the little
white volume of Pascal which went with her everywhere,
"whether it is really good for a woman to live with a man
who is morally her superior, as Richard is mine. It makes
one so dependent. I suppose I feel for him what my mother
and women of her generation felt for Oirist. It just shows
that one can't do without something^ She then fell into a
sleep, which was as usual extremely soimd and refreshing;
but, visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters stalk-
ing round the room, she woke up and laughed to herself, re-
membering where she was and that the Greek letters were
real people, lying asleep not many yards away. Then, think-
ing of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she
shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as
companions on the voyage. The dreams were not confined to
her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all
dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering
how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely
they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in
mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others* faces, and
hear whatever chance prompted them to say«

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CHAPTER IV

NEXT morning Clarissa was up before any erne else. She
dressed, and was out on deck, breathing the fresh air of
a calm morning, and, making the circuit of the ship for the
second time, ran straight into the lean person of Mr. Grice,
the steward. She apologised, and at the same time asked him
to enlighten her : what were those shiny brass stands for, half
glass on the top? She had been wondering, and could not
guess. When he had done explaining, she cried enthusiasti-
cally:

"I do think that to be a sailor must be the finest thing in
the world r

"And what d*you know about it?" said Mr. Grice, kindling
in a strange manner. "Pardon me. What does any man or
woman brought up in England know about the sea? They
profess to know ; but they don't."

The bitterness with which he spoke was ominous of what
was to come. He led her off to his own quarters, and, sitting
on the edge of a brass-bound table, looking uncommonly like
a sea-gull, with her white tapering body and thin alert face,
Mrs. Dalloway had to listen to the tirade of a fanatical man.
Did she realise, to begin with, what a very small part of the
world the land was? How peaceful, how beautiful, how be-
nignant in comparison with the sea? The deep waters could
sustain Europe unaided if every earthly animal died of the
plague to-morrow. Mr. Grice recalled dreadful sights which
he had seen in the richest city of the world — men and women
standing in line hour after hour to receive a mug of greasy
soup. "And I thought of the good flesh down here waiting
and asking to be caught. I'm not exactly a Protestant, and
I'm not a Catholic, but I could almost pray for the days of
popery to come again— -because of the fasts."

As he talked he kept opening drawers and moving little

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glass jars. Here were the treasures which the great ocean
had bestowed upon him — ^pale fish in greenish liquids, blobs
of jelly with streaming tresses, fish with lights in their heads^
they lived so deep.

"They have swum about among bones," Qarissa sighed.

"You're thinking of Shakespeare," said Mr. Grice, and
taking down a copy from a shelf well lined with books, recited
in an emphatic nasal voice:

Full fathom five thy father lies,

"A grand fellow, Shakespeare," he said, replacing the
volume.

Clarissa was so glad to hear him say so.

"Which is your favourite play? I wonder if it's, the same
as mine?"

"Henry the Fifth," said Mr. Grice.

"Joy!" cried Clarissa. "It is!"

Hamlet was what you might call too introspective for Mr.
Grice, the sonnets too passionate; Henry the Fifth was to him
the model of an English gentleman. But his favourite read-
ing was Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George; while
Emerson and Thomas Hardy he read for relaxation. He was
giving Mrs. Dalloway his views upon the present state of
England when the breakfast bell rung so imperiously that
she had to tear herself away, promising to come back and be
shown his sea-weeds.

The party, which had seemed so odd to her the night before,
was already gathered round the table, still under the influence
of sleep, and therefore uncommunicative, but her entrance
sent a little flutter like a breath of air through them all.

"I've had the most interesting talk of my life!" she ex-
claimed, taking her seat beside Willoughby. "D'you realise
that one of your men is a philosopher and a poet?"

"A very interesting fellow — that's what I always say," said
Willoughby, distinguishing Mr. Grice. "Though Rachel finds
him a bore."

"He's a bore when he talks about currents," said Rachel,
Her qres were full of sleep, but Mrs. Dalloway still seemed
to her wonderful.

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"I've never met a bore yet!" said Qarissa.

"And I should say the world was full of them!" exclaimed
Helen. But her beauty, which was radiant in the morning
light, took the contrariness from her words.

"I agree that it's the worst one can possibly say of any one,**
said Clarissa. "How much rather one would be a murderer
than a bore !" she added, with her usual air of sa)ring some-
thing profound. "One can fancy liking a murderer. It's the
same with dogs. Some dogs are awful bores, poor dears."

It happened that Richard was sitting next to Rachel. She
was curiously conscious of his presence and appearance — ^his
well-cut clothes, his crackling shirt-front, his cuffs with blue
rings round them, and the square-tipped, very clean fingers,
with the red stone on the little finger of the left hand.

"We had a dog who was a bore and knew it," he said, ad-
dressing her in cool, easy tones. "He was a Skye terrier, one
of those long chaps, with little feet poking out from their hair
like — ^like caterpillars — ^no, like sofas I should say. Well, we
had another dog at the same time, a black brisk animal — 3,
Schipperke, I think, you call them. You can't imagine a
greater contrast. The Skye so slow and deliberate, looking
up at you like some old gentleman in the club, as much as to
say, 'Yoa don't really mean it, do you?' and the Schipperke as
quick as a knife. I liked the Skye best, I must confess.
There was something pathetic about him."

The story seemed to have no climax.

"What happened to him?" Rachel asked.
. "That's a very sad story," said Richard, lowering his voice
and peeling an apple. "He followed my wife in the car one
day and got run over by a brute of a cyclist"

"Was he kiUed?" asked Rachel.

But Qarissa at her end of the table had overheard.

'TDon't talk of it!" she cried. "It's a thing I can't bear to
think of to this day."

Surely the tears stood in her eyes?

'That's the painful thing about pets," said Mr. Dalloway;
"they die. The first sorrow I can remember was for the death
of a dormouse. I regret to say that I sat upon it Still, that

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didn't make one any the less sorry. Here lies the duck that
Samuel Johnson sat on, eh ? I was big for my age."

"Then we had canaries," he continued, "a pair of ring-
doves, a lemur, and at one time a martin."

"Did you live in the country?" Rachel asked him.

'*We lived in the country for six months of the year. When
I say 'we' I mean four sisters, a brother, and mysdi. There's
nothing like coming of a large family. Sisters particularly
are delightful."

"Dick, you were horribly spoilt!" cried Clarissa across the
table.

"No, no. Appreciated," said Richard.

Rachel had other questions on the tip of her tongue; or
rather one enormous question, which she did not in the least
know how to put into words. The talk appeared too aii7
to admit of it.

"Please tell me — everything." That was what she wanted
to say. He had drawn apart one little chink and showed as-
tonishing treasures. It seemed to her incredible that a man
like that should be willing to talk to her. He had sisters and
pets, and once lived in the country. She stirred her tea round
and round ; the bubbles which swam and clustered in the cup
seemed to her like the union of their minds.

The talk meanwhile raced past her, and when Richard
suddenly started in a jocular tone of voice, "I'm sure Miss
Vinrace, now, has secret leanings toward Catholicism," she
had no idea what to answer, and Helen could not help laugh-
ing at the start she gave.

However, breakfast was over and Mrs. Dalloway was ris-
ing. "I always think religion's like collecting beetles," she
said, summing up the discussion as she went up the stairs with
Helen. "One person has a passiofi for black beetles ; another
hasn't ; it's no good arguing about it. What's your black beetle
now?"

"I suppose it's my children," said Helen.

"Ah— that's different," Clarissa breathed. "Do tdl me.
You have a boy, haven't you? Isn't it detestable, leaving
them?"

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It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool.
Their eyes became deeper, and their voices more cordial.

Instead of joining them as they began to pace the deck,
Rachel was indignant with the prosperous matrons, who made
her feel outside their world and motherless, and turning back,
she left them abruptly. She slammed the door of her room,
and pulled out her music. It was all old music — Bach and
Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell — ^the pages yellow, the en-
graving rough to the finger. In three minutes she was deep
in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her
face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete
absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled ; now
she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over ; but an
invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which
rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in thig
work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds
should stand together, and drew upon the whole of her fac-
ulties, that she never heard a knock at the door. It was
burst impulsively open, and Mrs. Dalloway stood in the room,
leaving the door open, so that a strip of the white deck and
of the blue sea appeared through the opening. The shape of
the Bach fugue crashed to the ground.

"Don't let me interrupt," Clarissa implored. "I heard you
playing, and I couldn't resist. I adore Bach!"

Rachel flushed and fumbled her fingers in her lap. She
%tood up awkwardly.

"It's too difficult," she said.

"But you were playing quite splendidly! I ought to have
stayed outside."

"No," said Rachel.

She slid Cowpet^s Letters and Wuthering Heights out of
the arm-chair, so that Qarissa was invited to sit there.

"What a dear little room !" she said, looking round. "Oh,
Cowper^s Lettersl I've never read them. Are they nice?"

"Rather dull," said Rachel.

"He wrote awfully well, didn't he?" said Clarissa; " — ^if
one like that kind of thing — ^finished his sentences and all that.
Wuthering H eights \ Ah— that's more in my line. I really
couldn't exist without the Brontes! Don't you love them?

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Still, on the whole, I'd rather live without them than without
Jane Austen."

Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner con-
veyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to
befriend.

"Jane Austen? I don't like Jane Austen," said Rachel.

"You monster !" Clarissa exclaimed. "I can only just for-
give you. Tell me why?"

"She's so — so— well, so like a tight plait," Rachel floun-
dered.

"Ah — I see what you mean. But I don't agree. And you
won't when you're older. At your age I only liked Shelley.
I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night.
Envy and calumny and hate and pain —

you remember?

Can touch him not and torture not again
From the contagion of the world's slow stain.

How divine! — ^and yet what nonsense!" She looked lightly
round the room. "I always think it's liznng, not dying, that
counts. I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who's
gone on adding up column after column all his days, and
trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog
he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of
the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight — I assure
you I know heaps like that — ^well, they seem to me reaUy
nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because
they're geniuses and die young. But I don't expect ^ou to
agree with me !"

She pressed Rachel's shoulder.

"Um-m-m — " she went on quoting —

Unrest which men miscall delight—

"when you're my age you'll see that the world is crammed
with delightful things. I think young people make such a

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mistake about that — ^not letting themselves be happy. I some-
times think that happiness is the only thing that counts. I
don't know you well enough to say, but I should guess you
might be a little inclined to— when one's young and attractive
— ^I'm going to say it! — ez/^ything's at one's feet." She
glanced round as much as to say, "not only a few stuffy books
and Bach."

"I long to ask questions," she continued. "You interest me
so much. If I'm impertinent, you must just box my ears."

"And I — I want to ask questions," said Rachel with such
earnestness that Mrs. Dalloway had to check her smile.

"D'you mind if we walk?" she said. "The air's so de-
licious."

She snuffed it like a racehorse as they shut the door and
stood on deck.

"Isn't it good to be alive?" she exclaimed, and drew Ra-
chel's arm within hers.

"Look, look ! How exquisite !"

The shores of Portugal were beginning to lose their sub-
stance; but the land was still the land, though at a great
distance. They could distinguish the little towns that were
sprinkled in the folds of the hills, and the smoke rising faintly.
The towns appeared to be very small in comparison with the
great purple mountains behind them.

"Honestly, though," said Clarissa, having looked, "I don't
like views. They're too inhuman." They walked on.

"How odd it is!" she continued impulsively. "This time
yesterday we'd never met. I was packing in a stuffy little
room in the hotel. We know absolutely nothing about each
other — ^and yet — I feel as if I did know you !"

"You have children — ^your husband was in Parliament?"

"You've never been to school, and you liv e - ■ ?"

"With my aunts at Richmond."

"Richmond?"

"You see, my aunts like the Park."

"And you don't ! I understand !" Qarissa laughed.

*'I like walking in the Park alone ; but not — ^witfi the dogs,"
she finished.

"No; and some people are dogs; aren't they?" said Clarissa,

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as if she had guessed a secret. ''But not every one— oh no,
not every one,"

"Not every one," said Rachel, and stopped.

"I can quite imagine you walking alone," said Clarissa;
"and thinking — in a little world of your own. But how you
will enjoy it — some day!"

"I shall enjoy walking with a man — ^is that what you
mean?" said Rachel, regarding Mrs. Dalloway with her large
enquiring eyes.

"I wasn't thinking of a man particularly," said Qarissa.
"But you will."

"No. I shall never marry," Rachel determined.

"I shouldn't be so sure of that," said Clarissa. Her side-
long glance told Rachel that she found her attractive although
she was inexplicably amused.

"Why do people marry?" Rachel asked.

"That's what you're going to find out," Qarissa laughed.

Rachel followed her eyes and found that they rested, f Or a
second, on the robust figure of Richard Dalloway, who was
engaged in striking a match on the sole of his boot; while
Willoughby expounded something, which seemed to be of
great interest to them both.

"There's nothing like it," she concluded. "Do tell me about
the Ambroses. Or am I asking too many questions?"

"I find you easy to talk to," said Rachel.

The short sketch of the Ambroses was, however, somewhat
perfunctory, and contained little but the fact that Mr. Am-
brose was her uncle.

"Your mother's brother?"

When a name has dropped out of use, the lightest touch
upon it tells. Mrs. Dalloway went on :

"Are you like your mother?"

"No; she was different," said Rachel.

She was overcome by an intense desire to tell Mrs. Dallo-
way things she had never told any one — ^things she had not
realised herself until this moment.

"I am lonely," she began. "I want — " She did not know
what she wanted, so that she could not finish the sentence; but
her lip quivered.

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But it seemed that Mrs. Dalloway was able to understand
without words.

"I know," she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel's
shoulder. "When I was your age I wanted too. No one un-
derstood until I met Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He's
man and woman as well." Her eyes rested upon Mr. Dallo-
way, leaning upon the rail, still talking. "Don't think I say
that because I'm his wife — I see his faults more clearly than
I see any one else's. What one wants in the person one lives
with is that they should keep one at one's best. I often won-
der what I've done to be so happy!" she exclaimed, and a
tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away, squeezed Ra*
chel's hand, and exclaimed :

"How good life is !" At that moment, standing out in the
fresh breeze, with the sun upon the waves, and Mrs. Dallo-
way's hand upon her arm, it seemed indeed as if life which
had been unnamed before was infinitely wonderful, and too
good to be true.

Here Helen passed them, and seeing Rachel arm-in-arm
with a comparative stranger, looking excited, was amused, but
at the same time slightly irritated. But they were immediately
joined by Richard, who had enjoyed a very interesting talk
with Willoughby and was in a sociable mood.

"Observe my Panama," he said, touching the brim of his
hat. "Are you aware. Miss Vinrace, how much can be done
to induce fine weather by appropriate headdress ? I have de-
termined that it is a hot summer day; I warn you that nothing
you can say will shake me. Therefore I am going to sit down.
I advise you to follow my example." Three chairs in a row
invited them to be seated.

Leaning back, Richard surveyed the waves.

"That's a very pretty blue," he said. "But there's a little
too much of it. Variety is essential to a view. Thus, if you
have hills you ought to have a river; if a river, hills. The
best view in the world in my opinion is that from Boars Hill
on a fine day — it must be a fine day, mark you — A rug? — Oh,
thank you, my dear. ... In that case you have also the ad-
vantage of associations — ^the Past."

"D'you want to talk, Dick, or shall I read atoud?"

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Clarissa had fetched a book with the rugs.

''Persuasion," announced Richard, examining the volume.

"That's for Miss Vinrace/' said Clarissa. "She can't bear |
our beloved Jane."

"That — if I may say so— is because you have not read her/'
said Richard. '*She is incomparably the! greatest femaJe
writer we possess."

"She is the greatest/* he continued, "and for this reason:
she does not attempt to write like a man. Every other woman
does ; on that account, I don't read 'em."

"Produce your instances. Miss Vinrace," he went on, join-
ing his finger-tips. "I'm ready to be converted."

He waited, while Rachel vainly tried to vindicate her sex
from the slight he put upon it.

"I'm afraid he's right," said Clarissa. "He generally is—
the wretch!"

"I brought Persuasion" she went on, "because I thought it
was a little less threadbare than the others — ^though, Dick, it's
no good your pretending to know Jane by heart, considering
that she always sends you to sleep !"

"After the labours of legislation, I deserve sleep," said
Richard.

"You're not to think about those guns," said Qarissa, see-
ing that his eye, passing over the waves, still sought the land
meditatively, "or about navies, or empires, or an)rthing." So
saying she opened the book and began to read:

"'Sir Walter Elliott, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire,
was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any
book but the Baronetage^ — don't you know Sir Walter?—
'There he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation
in a distressed one.' She does write well, doesn't she?
'There — ' " She read on in a light humorous voice. She was
determined that Sir Walter should take her husband's mind
off the guns of Britain, and divert him in an exquisite, quaint,
sprightly, and slightly ridiculous world. After a time it ap-
peared that the sun was sinking in that world, and the points
becoming softer. Rachel looked up to see what caused the
change, Richard's eyelids were closing and opening; open-

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ing and closing. A loud nasal breath announced that he no
longer considered appearances, that he was sound asleep.

"Triumph!" Clarissa whispered at the end of a sentence.
Suddenly she raised her hand in protest. A sailor hesitated ;
she gave the book to Rachel, and stepped lightly to take the
message — "Mr. Grice wished to know if it was convenient,''
etc. She followed him. Ridley, who had prowled unheeded,
started forward, stopped, and, with a gesture of disgust,
strode off to his study. The sleeping politician was left in
Rachel's charge. She read a sentence, and took a look at
him. In sleep he looked like a coat hanging at the end of
a bed ; there were all the wrinkles, and the sleeves and trousers
kept their shape though no longer filled out by legs and arms.
You can then best judge the age and state of the coat. She
looked him all over until it seemed to her that he must pro-
test.

He was a man of forty perhaps ; and here there were lines
round his eyes, and there curious clefts in his cheeks. Slight-
ly battered he appeared, but dogged and in the prime of life.

"Sisters and a dormouse and some canaries," Rachel mur-
mured, never taking her eyes off him. "I wonder, I wonder."
She ceased, her chin upon her hand, still looking at him. A
bell chimed behind them, and Richard raised his head. Then
he opened his eyes which wore for a second the queer look of
a short-sighted person's whose spectacles are lost. It took
him a moment to recover from the impropriety of having
snored, and possibly grunted, before a young lady. To wake
and find oneself left alone with one was also slightly discon-
certing.

"I suppose I've been dozing," he said. "What's happened
to every one? Clarissa?"

"Mrs Dalloway has gone to look at Mr. Grice's fish," Ra-
chel replied.

"I mig^t have guessed," said Richard. "It's a common oc-
currence. And how have you improved the shining hour?
Have you become a convert?"

"I don't think I've read a line," said Rachel.

"That's what I always find. There are too many things to

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look at. I find nature very stimulating myself. My hest
ideas have come to me out of doors."

"When you were walking?"

"Walking — riding — ^yachting — I suppose the most momai-
tous conversations of my 'life took place while perambulating
the great court at Trinity. I was at both universities. It was
a fad of my father's. He thought it broadening to the mind.
I think I agree with him. I can remember — ^what an age ago
it seems I — settling the basis of a future state with the present
Secretary for India. We thought ourselves very wise. Vm
not sure we weren't We were happy, Miss Vinrace, and we
were yoimg — ^gifts which make for wisdom."

"Have you done what you said you'd do?" she asked.

**A searching question! I answer — ^Yes and No. If on the
one hand I have not accomplished what I set out to accomplish
— ^which of us does?— on the other I can fairly say this: I
have not lowered my ideal."

He looked resolutely at a sea-gull, as though his ideal flew
on the wings of the bird.

"But," said Rachel, "what is your ideal?"

"There you ask too much, Miss Vinrace," said Richard
playfully.

She could only say that she wanted to know, and Richard
was sufficiently amused to answer.

"Well, how shall I reply? In one word — Unity. Unity of
aim, of dominion, of progress. The dispersion of the best
ideas over the greatest area."

"The English?"

"I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than
most men, their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don't run
away with the idea that I don't see the drawbacks^-horrors—
unmentionable things done in our very midst ! I'm under no
illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer illusions than
I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace?—
No, I suppose not — I may ^y I hope not."

As for Rachel, she luid scarcely walked through a poor
street, and always under the escort of father, maid, or aunts.

**I was going to say that if you'd ever seen the kind of
thing that's going on round you, you'd understand what it is

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that makes me and men like me politicians. You asked me a
moment ago whether I'd done what I set out to do. Well,
when I consider my life, there is one fact I admit that I'm
proud of; owing to me some thousands of girls in Lancashire
— and many thousands to come after thent— can spend an
hour every day in the open air which their mothers had to
spend over their looms. I'm prouder of that, I own, than I
should be of writing Keats and Shelley into the bargain !**

It became painful to Rachel to be one of those who write
Keats and Shelley into the bargain. She liked Richard Dallo-
way, and warmed as he warmed. He seemed to mean what he
said.

"I know nothing!" she exclaimed.

"It's far better that you should know nothing," he said pater-
nally, "and you wrong yourself, I'm sure. You play very
nicely, I'm told, and I've no doubt you've read heaps of
learned books."

Elderly banter would no longer check her.

"You talk of unity," she said. "You ought to make me
understand."

"I never allow my wife to talk politics," he said seriously.
"For this reason. It is impossible for human beings, consti-
tuted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals. If I have
preserved mine, as I am thankful to say that in great measure
I have. It is due to the fact that I have been able to come home
to my wife in the evening and to find that she has spent her
day in calling, music, play with the children, domestic duties —
what you will; her illusions have not been destroyed. She
gives me courage to go on. The strain of public life is very
great, he added.

This made him appear a battered martyr, parting every day
with some of the finest gold, in the service of mankind.

"I can't think," Rachel exclaimed, "how any one does it !"

"Expkin, Miss Vinrace," said Richard. "This is a matter
I want to clear up."

His kindness was genuine, and she determined to take the
chance he gave her, although to talk to a man of such worth
and authority made her heart beat.

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'It seems to me like this/' she began, doing her best first to
recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions.

''There's an old widow in her room, somewhere, let us sup-
pose in the suburbs of Leeds."

Richard bent his head to show that he accepted the widow.

"In London you're spending your life, talking, writing
things, getting bills through, missing what seems natural. The
result of it all is that she goes to her cupboard and finds a
little more tea, a few lumps of sugar, or a little less tea and
a newspaper. Widows all over the country I admit do this.
Still, there's the mind of the widow — ^the affections; those yovL
leave untouched. But you waste your own.'*

"If the widow goes to her cupboard and finds it bare,"
Richard answered, "her spiritual outlook we may admit will
be affected. If I may pick holes in your philosophy. Miss
Vinrace, which has its merits, I would point out that a human
being is not a set of compartments, but an organism. Imag-
ination, Miss Vinrace ; use your imagination ; that's where you
young Liberals fail. Conceive the world as a whole. Now
for your second point; when you assert that in trying to set
the house in order for the benefit of tiie young generation I
am wasting my higher capabilities, I totally disagree with you.
I can conceive no more exalted aim — ^to be the citizen of the
Empire. Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the
state as a complicated machine ; we citizens are parts of that
machine; some fulfil more important duties; others (perhaps
I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure part9
of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if
the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the
whole is imperilled."

It was impossible to combine the image of a lean black
widow, gazing out of her window, and longing for some one
to talk to, with the image of a vast machine, such as one sees
at South Kensington, thumping, thumping, thumping. The
attempt at communication had been a failure.

"We don't seem to understand each other," she said.

"Shall I say something that will make you very angry ?" he
replied.

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"It won't," said Rachel.

"Well, then ; no woman has what I may call the political in-
stinct. You have very great virtues; I am the first, I hope,
to admit that ; but I have never met a woman who even saw
what is meant by statesmanship. I am going to make you still
more angry. I hope that I never shall meet such a woman.
Now, Miss Vinrace, are we enemies for life?"

Vanity, irritation, and a thrusting desire to be understood,
urged her to make another attempt.

**Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the tele-
phones, there is something alive; is that what you mean? In
things like dust-carts, and men mending roads? You feel
that all the time when you walk about London, and when you
turn on a tap and the water comes?"

"Certainly," said Richard. "I understand you to mean that
the whole of modem society is based upon co-operative effort.
If only more people would realise that. Miss Vinrace, there
would be fewer of your old widows in solitary lodgings !"

Rachel considered.

"Are you a Liberal or are you a Conservative?" she asked.

"I call myself a Conservative for convenience sake," said
Richard, smiling. "But there is more in common between the
two parties than people generally allow."

There was a pause, which did not come on Rachel's side
from any lack of things to say; as usual she could not say
them, and was further confused by the fact that the time for
talking probably ran short. She was haunted by absurd jum-
bled ideas — ^how, if one went back far enough, everything per-
haps was intelligible; everything was in common; for the
mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High
Street had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon,
and her aunts.

"Did you say you lived in the country when you were a
child?" she asked.

Crude as her manners seemed to him, Richard was flat-
tered. There could be no doubt that her interest was genuine.

"I did," he smiled.

"And what happened?" she asked. "Or do I ask too many
questions?"

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'Tm flattered, I assure you. But — ^let me see — what hap-
pened? Well, riding, lessons, sisters. There was an enchant-
ed rubbish heap, I remember, where all kinds of queer things
happened. Odd, what things impress children ! I can remem-
ber the look of the place to this day. It's a fallacy to think
that children are happy. They're not ; they're unhappy. I've
never suffered so much as I did when I was a child."

"Why?" she asked.

"I didn't get on well with my father," said Richard shortly.
"He was a very able man, but hard. Well — it makes one de-
termined not to sin in that way oneself. Children never for-
get injustice. They forgive heaps of things grown-up people
mind; but that sin is the unpardonable sin. Mind you — ^I
daresay I was a difficult child to manage; but when I think
what I was ready to give! No, I was more sinned against
than sinning. And then I went to school, where I did very
fairly well; and then, as I say, my father sent me to both
universities. . . . D'you know, Miss Vinrace, you've made me
think? How little, after all, one can tell anybody about one's
life ! Here I sit ; there you sit ; both, I doubt not, chock-full of
the mo^t interesting experiences, ideas, emotions; yet how
communicate? I've told you what every second person you
meet might tell you."

"I don't think so," she said. "It's the way of saying
things, isn't it, not the things?"

"True," said Richard. "Perfectly true." He paused.
"When I look back over my life — ^I'm forty-two — what are the
great facts that stand out? What were the revelations, if I
may call them so? The misery pf the poor and — (he hesi-
tated and pitched over) "love" !

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that
seemed to unveil the skies for Rachel.

"It's an odd thing to say to a young lady," he continued.
"But have you any idea what — what I mean by that? No; of
course not. I don't use the word in a conventional sense. I
use it as young men use it. Girls are kept very ignorant,
aren't they. Perhaps it's wise — ^perhaps — You don't know?"

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was
saying.

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*'No; I don't/' she said, scarcely speaking above her breath.

"Warships, Dick! Over there! Look!"

Qarissa, released from Mr. Grice, appreciative of all his
seaweeds, skimmed towards them, gesticulating.

She had sighted two sinister grey vessels, low in the water,
and bald as bone, one closely following the other with the
look of eyeless beasts seeking their prey. Consciousness re-
turned to Richard instantly.

"By George V he exclaimed, and stood shielding his eyes.

"Ours, Dick?" said Clarissa.

"The Mediterranean Fleet," he answered.

The Euphrosyne was slowly dipping her flag. Richard
raised his hat. Convulsively Clarissa squeezed Rachel's hand.

"Aren't you glad to be English !" she said.

The warships drew past, casting a curious effect of discip-
line and sadness upon the waters, and it was not until they
were again invisible that people spoke to each other naturally.
At hmch the talk was all of valour and death, and the mag-
nific^it qualities of British admirals. Clarissa quoted one
poet, Willoughby quoted another. Life on board a man-of-
war was splendid, so they agreed, and sailors, whenever one
met them, were more than usually admirable.

This being so, no one liked it when Helen remarked that
it seemed to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a Zoo, and
that as for dying on a battle-field, surely it was time we ceased
to praise coun^;e — ^"or to write bad poetry about it," snarled
Pepper.

But Helen was really wondering why Rachel, sitting silent,
k)oked so queer and flushed

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CHAPTER V

SHE was not able to follow up her observations, however,
or to come to any conclusion, for by one of those accidents
which are liable to happen at sea, the whole course of their
lives was now put out of order.

Even at tea the floor rose beneath their feet and pitched
too low again, and at dinner the ship seemed to groan and
strain as though a lash were descending. She who had been
^ broad-backed dray-horse, upon whose hind-quarters pierrots
might waltz, became a colt in a field. The plates slanted away
from the loiives, and Mrs. Dalloway's face blanched for a
second as she helped herself and saw the potatoes roll this
way and that. Willoughby, of course, extolled the virtues of
his ship, and quoted what had been said of her by experts and
distinguished passengers, for he loved his own possessions*
Still, dinner was uneasy, and directly the ladies were alone
Clarissa owned that she would be better oflE in bed, and went,
smiling bravely.

Next morning the storm was on them, and no politeness
could ignore it. Mrs. Dalloway stayed in her room. Richard
faced three meals, eating valiantly at each; but at the third,
certain glazed asparagus swimming in oil finally conquered
him.

"That beats me," he said, and withdrew.

"Now we are alone once more,** remarked William Pepper,
looking round the table ; but no one was ready to engage him
in talk, and the meal ended in silence.

On the following day they met — ^but as flying leaves meet
in the air. Sick they were not; but the wind propelled them
hastily into rooms, violently downstairs. They passed each
other gasping on deck; they shouted across tables. They
wore fur coats ; and Helen was never seen without a bandanna
on her head. For comfort they retreated to their cabins,

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where with tightly wedged feet they let the ship bounce and
tumble. Their sensations were the sensations of potatoes in a ^'
sack on a galloping horse. The world outside was merely a
violent grey tumult. For two days they had a perfect rest from
their old emotions. Rachel had just enough consciousness to
suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a hail-
storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became a
wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt Atlantic gale.

Helen, on the other hand, staggered to Mrs. Dalloway's
door, knocked, could not be heard for the slamming of doors
and the battering of wind, stnd entered.

There were basins, of course. Mrs. Dalloway lay half-
raised on a pillow, and did not open her eyes. Then she mur-
mured, "Oh, Dick, is that you?"

Helen shouted — for she was thrown against the wash stand
— ^"How are you?"

Clarissa opened one eye. It gave her an incredibly dissi-
pated appearance. ** Awful !" she gasped. Her lips were white
inside.

Ranting her feet wide, Helen contrived to pour champagne
into a tumbler with a tooth-brush in it.

"Champagne," she said.

"There's a tooth-brush in it," murmured Qarissa and
smiled; it might have been the contortion of one weeping.
She drank.

"Disgusting," she whispered, indicating the basins. Relics
of humour still played over her face like moonshine.

"Want more?" Helen shouted. Speech was again beyond
Qarissa's reach. The wind laid the ship shivering on her
side. Pale agonies crossed Mrs. Dalloway in waves. When
the curtains flapped, grey lights puffed across her. Between
the spasms of the storm, Helen made the curtain fast, shook
the pillows, stretched the bed-clothes, and smoothed the hot
nostrils and forehead with cold scent.

"You a/re good !" Qarissa gasped. "Horrid mess !"

She was trying to apologise for white underclothes fallen
and scattered on the floor. For one second she opened a sin-
gle eye, and saw that the room was tidy. "That's nice," she
gasx)e<L

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Helen left her ; far, far away she knew that she felt a kind
of Uking for Mrs. Dalloway. She could not help respecting
her spirit and her desire, even in the throes of sickness, for
a tidy bedroom. Her petticoats, however, rose above her
knees.

Quite suddenly the storm relaxed its grasp. It happened
at tea ; the expected paroxysm of the blast gave out just as it
reached its climax and dwindled away, and the ship instead
of taking the usual plunge went steadily. The monotonous
order of plunging and rising, roaring and relaxing, was in-
terfered with, and every one at table looked up and felt
something loosen within them. The strain was slackened
and human feelings began to peep again, as they do when
daylight shows at the end of a tunnel.

"Try a turn with me," Ridley called across to Rachel.

"Foolish!" cried Helen, but they went stumbling up the
ladder. Choked by the wind their spirits rose with a rush,
for on the skirts of all the grey tumult was a misty spot of
gold. Instantly the world dropped into shape; they were no
longer atoms fl)ring in the void, but people riding a triumphant
ship on the back of the sea. Wind and space were banished;
the world floated like an apple in a tub, and the mind of men,
which had been unmoored also, once more attached itself to
the old beliefs.

Having scrambled twice round the ship and received many
sound cuffs from the wind, they saw a sailor's face positively
shine golden. They looked, and beheld a complete yellow cir-
cle of sun ; next minute it was traversed by sailing strands of
cloud, and then completely hidden. By breakfast the next
morning, however, the sky was swept clean, the waves, al-
though steep, were blue, and after their view of the strange
under-world, inhabited by phantoms, people began to live
among tea-pots and loaves of bread with greater zest than
ever.

Richard and Qarissa, however, still remained on the bor-
derland. She did not attempt to sit up ; her husband stood on
his feet, contemplated his waistcoat and trousers, shook his
head, and then lay down again. The inside of his brain was
still rising and falling Uke the sea on the stage. At four

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o'clock he woke from sleep and saw the sunlight make a vivid
angle across the red plush curtains and the grey tweed trous-
ers. The ordinary world outside slid into his mind, and by
the time he was dressed he was an English gentleman again.

He stood beside his wife. She pulled him down to her by
the lapd of his coat» kissed him, and held him fast for a
minute.

"Go and get a breath of air, Dick,'* she said. ^'You look
quite washed out. . . . How nice you smell! . . . And be
polite to that woman. She was so kind to me."

Thereupon Mrs. Dalloway turned to the cool side of her
pillow, terribly flattened but still invincible.

Richard found Helen talking to her brother-in-law, over
two dishes of yellow cake and smooth bread and butter.

'*You look very ill!" she exclaimed on seeing him. "Come
and have some tea."

He ranarked that the hands that moved about the cups
were beautiful.

*T hear youVe been very good to my wife," he said. "She's
had an awful time of it. You came in and fed her with
champagne. Were you among the saved yourself?"

"I? Oh, I hav«i't been sick for twenty years — sea-side, I
mean."

"There are three stages of convalescence, I always say,"
bn^e in the hearty voice of Willoughby, 'The milk stage, the
bread-and-butter stage, and the roast-beef stage. I should say
you were at the bread-and-butter stage." He handed him the
plate.

"Now, I should advise a hearty tea, then a brisk walk on
deck; and by dinner-time youTl be clamouring for beef, eh?"
He went off laughing, excusing himself on the score of busi-
ness.

"What a splendid fellow he is I" said Richard. "Always
keen on something."

"Yes," said Helen, "he's always been like that."

"This is a great undertaking of his," Richard omtinued.
"It's a business that won't stop with ships, I should say. We
shall see him in Parliament, or I'm much mistaken. He's th6

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kind of man we want in Parliament — ^the man who has done
things."

But Helen was not much interested in her brother-in-law.

"I expect your head's aching, isn't it?" she asked, pouring
a fresh cup.

"Well, it is," said Richard. "It's humiliating to find what
a slave one is to one's body in this world. D'you know, I can
never work without a kettle on the hob. As often as not I
don't drink tea, but I must feel that J can if I want to."

"That's very bad for you," said Helen.

"It shortens one's life; but I'm afraid, Mrs. Ambrose, we
politicians must make up our minds to that at the outset.
We've got to burn the candle at both ends, or "

"You've cooked your goose !" said Helen brightly.

"We can't make you take us seriously, Mrs. Ambrose," he
protested. "May I ask how you've spent your time ? Reading
— ^philosophy?" (He saw the black book.) "Metaphysics and
fishing!" he exclaimed. "If I had to live again I believe I
should devote myself to one or the other." He began turn-
ing the pages.

" 'Good, then, is indefinable/ " he read out. "How jolly to
think that's going on still! 'So far as I know there is only
one ethical writer, Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly
recognised alid stated this fact.' That's just the kind of
thing we used to talk about when we were boys. I can re-
member arguing until five in the morning with Duffy — now
Secretary for India — ^pacing round and round those cloisters
until we decided it was too late to go to bed, and we went
for a ride instead. Whether we ever came to any conclusion —
that's another matter. Still, it's the arguing that counts. It's
things like that that stand out in life. Nothing's been quite so
vivid since. It's the philosophers, it's the scholars," he con-
tinued, "they're the people who pass the torch, who keep the
light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn't
necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose."

"No. Why should it?" said Helen. "But can you remem-
ber if your wife takes sugar?"

She lifted the tray and went off with it to Mrs. Dalloway.

Richard twisted a mufiler twice round his throat and strug-

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gled up on deck. His body, which had grown white and ten-
der in a dark room, tingled all over in the fresh air. He felt
himself a man undoubtedly in the prime of life. Pride glowed
in his eye as he let the wind buffet him and stood firm. With
his head slightly lowered he sheered round comers, strode up-
hill, and met the blast. There was a collision. For a second
he could not see what the body was he had run into. "Sorry."
"Sorry." It was Rachel who apologised. They both laughed,
too much blown about to speak. She drove open the door of
her room and stepped into its calm. In order to speak to her,
it was necessary that Richard should follow. They stood in
a whirlpool of wind; papers began flying round in circles,
the door crashed to, and they tumbled, laughing, into chairs.
Richard sat upon Bach.

"My word ! What a tempest !" he exclaimed.

"Fine, isn't it?" said Rachel. Certainly the struggle and
wind had given her a decision she lacked; red was in her
cheeks, and her hair was down.

"Oh, what fun !" he cried. "What am I sitting on? Is this
your room? How jolly!"

"There — sit there," she commanded. Cowper slid once more.

"How jolly to meet again," said Richard. "It seems an
age. Cowper^s Letters? . . . Bach? . . . Wuthering Heights?
... Is this where you meditate on the world, and then come
out and pose poor politicians with questions? In the intervals
of sea-sickness I've thought a lot of our talk. I assure you,
you made me think."

"I made you think! But why?"

"What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace ! How little
we can communicate! There are lots of things I should like
to tell you about — ^to hear your opinion of. Have you ever
read Burke?"

"Burke ?" she repeated. "Who was Burke ?"

"No? Well, then, I shall make a point of sending you a
copy. The Speech on the French Revolution — The American
Rebellion? Which shall it be, I wonder?" He noted some-
thing in his pocket-book. "And then you must write and tell
me what you think of it. This reticence — ^this isolation —
that's what's the matter with modern life! Now, tell me

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about yourself. What are your interests and occupations? I
should imagine that you were a person with very strong inter-
ests. Of course you are! Good God! When I think of the
age we live in, with its opportunities and possibilities, the mass
of things to be done and enjoyed — why haven't we ten lives
instead of one? But about yourself?"

"You see, I'm a woman," said Rachel.

"I know — I know," said Richard, throwing his head back,
and drawing his fingers across his eyes.

"How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful
woman," he continued sententiously, "has the whole world at
her feet. That's true, Miss Vinrace. You have an inestimable

power — for good or for evil. What couldn't you do ** he

broke off.

"What?" asked Rachel.

"You have beauty," he said. The ship lurched. Rachel
fell slightly forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed
her. Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that
she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his
cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in her chair, with tre-
mendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves
across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.

"You tempt me," he said. The tone of his voice was ter-
rifying. He seemed choked in fight. They were both trem-
bling. Rachel stood up and went. Her head was cold, her
knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so
great that she could only keep herself moving above the great
leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and
gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept
over her. Far out between the waves little black and white
sea-birds were riding. Rising and falling with smooth and
graceful movements in the hollows of the waves they seemed
singularly detached and unconcerned.

"You're peaceful," she said. She becan^e peaceful too, at
the same time possessed with a strange exultation. Life
seemed to hold infinite possibilities she had never guessed at.
She l«uit upon the rail and looked over the troubled grey
waters, where the sunlight was fitfully scattered upon the
crests of the waves, until she was cold and absolutely calm

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again. Nevertheless something wonderful had happened.

At dinner, however, she did not feel exalted, but merely
uncomfortable, as if she and Richard had seen something to-
gether which is hidden in ordinary life, so that they did not
like to look at each other. Richard slid his eyes over her un-
easily once, and never looked at her again. Formal platitudes
were manufactured with effort, but Willoughby was kindled.

"Beef for Mr. Dalloway!" he shouted. "Come now — after
that walk you're at the beef stage, Dalloway!"

Wonderful masculine stories followed about Bright and
Disraeli and coalition governments, wonderful stories which
made the people at the dinner-table seem featureless and small.
After dinner, sitting alone with Rachel under the great swing-
ing lamp, Helen was struck by her pallor. It once more oc-
curred to her that there was something strange in the girl's
behaviour.

"You look tired. Are you tired?" she asked.

"Not tired," said Rachel. "Oh yes, I suppose I am tired."

Helen advised bed, and she went, not seeing Richard again.
She must have been very tired for she fell asleep at once,
but after an hour or two of dreamless sleep, she dreamt. She
dreamt that she was walking down a long tunnel, which grew
so narrow by degrees that she could touch the damp bricks on
either side. At length the tunnel opened and became a vault ;
she fotmd herself trapped in it, bricks meeting her wherever
she turned, alone with a little deformed man who squatted on
the floor gibbering, with long nails. His face was pitted and
like the face of an animal. The wall behind him oozed with
damp, which collected into drops and slid down. Still and
cold as death she lay, not daring to move, until she broke the
agony by tossing herself across the bed, and woke crying
"Ohr

light showed her the familiar things : her clothes, fallen oflF
the chair; the water jug gleaming white; but the horror did
not go at once. She felt herself pursued, so that she got up
and actually locked her door. A voice moaned for her ; eyes
desired her. All night long barbarian men harrassed the ship ;
they came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to snuffle
at her door. She could not sleep again.

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CHAPTER VI

THAT'S the tragedy of life— as I always say!" said Mrs.
Dalloway. "Beginning things and having to end them.
Still, I'm not going to let this end, if you're willing." It was
the morning, the sea was calm, and the ship once again was
anchored not far from another shore.

She was dressed in her long fur cloak, with the veils wound
round her head, and once more the rich boxes stood on top
of each other so that the scene of a few days back seemed to
be repeated.

"D'you suppose we shall ever meet in London?" said Ridley
ironically. "You'll have forgotten all about me by the time you
step out there."

He pointed to the shore of the little bay, where they could
now see the separate trees with moving branches.

"How horrid you are !" she laughed. "Rachel's coming to
see me anyhow — ^the instant you get back," she said, pressing
Rachel's arm. "Now — ^you've no excuse!"

With a silver pencil she wrote her name and address on the
flyleaf of Persuasion, and gave the book to Rachel. Sailors
were shouldering the luggage, and people were beginning to
congregate. There were Captain Cobbold, Mr. Grice, Wil-
loughby, Helen, and an obscure grateful man in a blue jersey.

"Oh, it's time," said Clarissa. "Well, good-bye. I do like
you," she murmured as she kissed Rachel. People in the way
made it unnecessary for Richard to shake Rachel by the hand;
he managed to look at her very stiffly for a second before he
followed his wife down the ship's side.

The boat separating from the vessel made off towards the
land, and for some minutes Helen, Ridley, and Rachel leant
over the rail, watching. Once Mrs. Dalloway turned and
waved ; but the boat steadily grew smaller and smaller until it
ceased to rise and fall, and nothing could be seen save two
resolute backs.

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"Well, that's over/' said Ridley after a long silence. "We
shall never see them again," he added, turning to go to his
books. A feeling of emptiness and melancholy came over
them ; they knew in their hearts that it was over ; that they had
parted for ever ; and the knowledge filled them with far greater
depression than the length of their acquaintance seemed to jus-
tify. Even as the boat pulled away they could feel other sights
and sounds beginning to take the place of the Dalloways, and
the feeling was so unpleasant that they tried to resist it. For
so, too, would they be forgotten.

In much the same way that Mrs. Chailey downstairs was
sweeping the withered rose-leaves off the dressing-table, so
Helen was anxious to make things straight again after the vis-
itors had gone. Rachel's obvious languor and listlessness made
her an easy prey, and indeed Helen had devised a kind of trap.
That something had happened she now felt pretty certain;
moreover, she had come to think that they had been strangers
long enough; she wished to know what the girl was like,
partly of course because Rachel showed no disposition to be
known. So, as they turned from the rail, she said :

"Come and talk to me instead of practising," and led the way
to the sheltered side where the deck-chairs were stretched in the
sun. Rachel followed her indifferently. Her mind was ab-
sorbed by Richard; by the extreme strangeness of what had
happened, and by a thousand feelings of which she had not
been conscious before. She made scarcely any attempt to listen
to what Helen was saying, as Helen indulged in commonplaces
to begin with. While Mrs. Ambrose arranged her embroidery,
sucked her silk, and threaded her needle, she lay back gazing
at the horizon.

"Did you like those people ?" Helen asked her casually.

"Yes," she replied blankly.

"You talked to him, didn't you?"

She said nothing for a minute.

"He kissed me," she said without any change of tone.

Helen started, looked at her, but could not make out what
she felt.

"M-m-m'yes," she said, after a pause. "I thought he was
that kind of man."

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"What kind of man ?" said Rachel.

"Pompous and sentimental."

"I liked him," said Rachel

"So you didn't mind?"

For the first time since Helen had known her Rachel's ^es
lit up brightly.

"I did mind," she said vehemently. "I dreamt. I couldn't
sleep."

"Tell me what happened," said Helen. She had to keep her
lips from twitching as she listened to Rachel's story. It was
poured out abruptly with great seriousness and no sense of
humour.

"We talked about politics. He told me what he had done
for the poor somewhere. I asked him all sorts of questions.
He told me about his own life. The day before yesterday,
after the storm, he came in to see me. It happened then, quite
suddenly. He kissed me. I don't know why." As she spoke
she grew flushed. "I was a good deal excited," she continued.
"But I didn't mind till afterwards ; when — " she paused, and
saw the figure of the bloated little man again — ^"I became ter-
rified."

From the look in her eyes it was evident she was again terri-
fied. Helen was really at a loss what to say. From the little
she knew of Rachel's upbringing she supposed that she had
been kept entirely ignorant as to the relations of men with
women. With a shyness which she felt with women and not
with men she did not like to explain simply what these are.
Therefore she took the other course and belittled the whole
affair.

"Oh, well," she said, "he was a silly creature^ and if I were
you, I'd think no more about it."

"No," said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, "I shan't do that. I
shall think about it all day and all night until I find out exactly
what it does mean."

"Don't you ever read?" Helen asked tentatively.

"Cowper's Letters — ^that kind of thing. Father gets them
for me or my Aunts."

Helen could hardly restrain herself from saying out loud
what she thought of a man who brought up his daughter so that

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at the age of twenty-four she scarcely knew that men desired
women and was terrified by a kiss. She had good reason to
fear that Rachel had made herself incredibly ridiculous.

"You don't know many men?" she asked.

"Mr. Pepper," said Rachel ironically.

"So no one's ever wanted to marry you?**

"No," she answered ingenuously.

Helen reflected that as, from what she had said, Rachel cer-
tainly would think these things out, it might be as well to help
her.

"You oughtn't to be frightened," she said. "It's the most
natural thing in the world. Men will want to kiss you, just as
they'll want to marry you. The pity is to get things out of
proportion. It's like noticing the noises people make when they
eat, or men spitting; or, in short, any small thing that gets on
one's nerves."

Rachel seemed to be inattentive to these remarks. "Tell
me," she said suddenly, "what are those women in Piccadilly?*

"In Piccadilly ? They are prostitutes," said Helen.

"It is terrifying — ^it is disgusting," Rachel asserted, as if she
included Helen in her hatred.

"It is," said Helen. "But "

"I did like him," Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself.
'*! wanted to talk to him ; I wanted to know what he'd done.
The women in Lancashire "

It seemed to her as she recalled their talk that there was
something lovable about Richard, good in their attempted
friendship, and strangely piteous in the way they had parted.

The softening of her mood was apparent to Helen.

"You see," she said, "you must take things as they are;
and if you want friendship with men you must run risks.
Personally," she continued, breaking into a smile, "I think it's
worth it ; I don't mind being kissed ; I'm rather jealous, I be-
lieve, that Mr. Dalloway kissed you and didn't kiss me.
Though," she added, "he bored me considerably."

But Rachel did not return the smile or dismiss the whole af-
fair, as Helen meant her to. Her mind was working very
quickly, inconsistently and painfully. Helen's words hewed
down great blocks which had stood there always, and the light

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which came in was cold. After sitting for a time with fixed
eyes, she burst out :

"So that's why I can't walk alone f"

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creep-
ing hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here
turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made duU and crip-
pled for ever — ^her life that was the only chance she had —
the short season between two silences.

"Because men are brutes ! I hate men !" she exclaimed.

"I thought you said you liked him?" said Helen.

"I liked him, and I liked being kissed," she answered, as if
that only added more difficulties to her problem.

Helen was surprised to see how genuine both shock and
problem were, but she could think of no way of easing the
difficulty except by going on talking. She wanted to make her
niece talk, and so to understand why this rather dull, kindly,
plausible politician had made so deep an impression on her,
for surely at the age of twenty-four this was not natural.

"And did you like Mrs. Dalloway too?" she asked.

As she spoke she saw Rachel redden; for she remembered
silly things she had said, and also, it occurred to her that she
treated this exquisite woman rather badly, for Mrs. Dalloway
had said that she loved her husband.

"She was quite nice, but a thimble-pated creature," Helen
continued. "I never heard such nonsense ! Chitter-chatter-chit-
ter-chatter — fish and the Greek alphabet — ^never listened to a
word any one said — chock-full of idiotic theories about the
way to bring up children — I'd far rather talk to him any day.
He was pompous, but he did at least imderstand what was said
to him."

The glamour insensibly faded a little both from Richard and
Clarissa. They had not been so wonderful after all, then, in
the eyes of a mature person.

"It's very difficult to know what people are like," Rachel
remarked, and Helen saw with pleasure that she spoke more
naturally. "I suppose I was taken in."

There was little doubt about that according to Helen, but
she restrained herself and said aloud:

"One has to make experiments."

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**And they were nice," said Rachel. "They were extraordi-
narily interesting." She tried to recall the image of the world
as a live thing that Richard had given her, with drains like
nerves, and bad houses like patches of diseased skin. She re-
called his watchwords — ^Unity — Imagination, and saw again
the bubbles meeting in her tea-cup as he spoke of sisters and
canaries, boyhood and his father, her small world becoming
wonderfully enlarged.

"But all people don't seem to you equally interesting, do
they?" asked Mrs. Ambrose.

Rachel explained that most people had hitherto been syva-
bols ; but that when they talked to one they ceased to be sym-
bols, and became "I could listen to them for ever !" she

exclaimed, and became absorbed in her thoughts.

Helen meanwhile stitched at her embroidery and thought
over the things they had said. Her conclusion was that she
would very much like to show her niece, if it were possible,
how to live, or as she put it, how to be a reasonable person.
She thought that there must be something wrong in this con-
fusion between politics and kissing politicians, and that an elder
person ought to be able to help.

"I quite agree," she said, "that people are very interesting;
only — *' Rachel looked up enquiringly.

"Only I think you ought to discriminate," she ended. "It's
a pity to be intimate with people who are — ^well, rather second-
rate, like the Dalloways, and to find it out later."

"But how does one know ?" Rachel asked.

"I really can't tell you," replied Helen candidly, after a mo-
ment's thought. "You'll have to find out for yourself. But
try and — Why don't you call me Helen?" she added.
" 'Aunt's' a horrid name. I never liked my Aunts."

"I should like to call you Helen," Rachel answered.

"D'you think me very unsympathetic ?"

Rachel reviewed the points which Helen had certainly failed
to understand ; they arose chiefly from the difference of nearly
twenty years in age between them, which made Mrs. Ambrose
appear too humorous and cool in a matter of such moment.

"No," she said. "Some things you don't understand, of
course."

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"Of course," Helen agreed. "So now you can go ahead and
be a person on your own account/' she added.

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real ever-
lasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like
the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became
profoundly excited at the thought of living.

"I can be m-m-myself," she stammered, "in spite of you, in
spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my
Aunts, in spite of these?"

"In spite of every one," said Helen gravely. She then put
down her needle, and explained a plan which had come into her
head as they talked. Instead of wandering on down the Ama-
zons until she reached some sulphurous tropical port, where
one had to lie within doors all day beating off insects with a
fan, the sensible thing to do surely was to spend the season
with them in their villa by the seaside, where among other
advantages Mrs. Ambrose herself would be at hand to

"After all, Rachel," she broke off, "it's silly to pretend that
because there's twenty years' difference between us we there-
fore can't talk to each other like human beings."

"No; because we like each other," said Rachel.

"Yes," Mrs. Ambrose agreed.

That fact, together with other facts, had been made clear
by their twenty minutes' talk, although how they had come
to these conclusions they could not have said.

However they were come by, they were sufHciently serious
to send Mrs. Ambrose a day or two later in search of her
brother-in-law. She found him sitting in his room working,
applying a stout blue pencil authoritatively to bundles of filmy
paper. Papers lay to left and to right of him, there were great
envelopes so gorged with papers that they spilt papers on to
the table. Above him hung a photograph of a woman's head.
The need of sitting absolutely still before a Cockney photogra-
pher had given her lips a queer little pucker, and her eyes for
the same reason looked as though she thought the whole situa-
tion ridiculous. Nevertheless it was the head of an individual
and interesting woman, who would no doubt have turned and
laughed at Willoughby if she could have caught his eye ; but
when he looked up at her he sighed profoundly. In his mind

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this work of his, the great factories at Hull which showed like
mountains at night, the ships that crossed the ocean punctually,
the schemes for combining this and that and building up a solid
mass of industry, was all an oflFering to her; he laid his suc-
cess at her feet ; and was always thinking how to educate his
daughter so that Theresa might be glad. He was a very am-
bitious man; and although he had not been particularly kind
to her while she lived, as Helen thought, he now believed that
she watched him from Heaven, and inspired what was good
in him.

Mrs. Ambrose apologised for the interruption, and asked
whether she might speak to him about a plan of hers. Would
he consent to leave his daughter with them when they landed,
instead of taking her on up the Amazons?

"We would take great care of her/' she added, "and we
should really like it."

Willoughby looked very grave and carefully laid aside his
papers.

"She's a good girl," he said at length. "There is a likeness ?"
— ^he nodded his head at the photograph of Theresa and sighed.
Helen looked at Theresa pursing up her lips before the Cock-
ney photographer. It suggested her in an absurd human way,
and she felt an intense desire to share some joke.

"She's the only thing thafs left to me," sighed Willoughby.
'*We go on year after year without talking about these

things " He broke off. "But it's better so. Only, life's

very hard."

Helen was sorry for him, and patted him on the shoulder,
but she felt uncomfortable when her brother-in-law expressed
his feelings, and took refuge in praising Rachel, and explain-
ing why she thought her plan might be a good one.

"True," said Willoughby when she had done. "The social
conditions are bound to be primitive. I should be out a good
deal. I agreed because she wished it. And of course I have
complete confidence in you. . . . You see, Helen," he con-
tinued, becoming confidential, "I want to bring her up as her
mother would have wished. I don't hold with these modem
views — ^any more than you do, eh? She's a nice quiet girl,
devoted to her music — ^a little less of that would do no harm.

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Still, it's kept her happy, and we lead a very quiet life at Rich-
mond. I should like her to begin to see more people. I want
to take her about with me when I get home. I've half a mind
to rent a house in London, leaving my sisters at Richmond,
and take her to see one or two people who'd be kind to her
for my sake. I'm beginning to realise," he continued, stretch-
ing himself out, "that all this is tending to Parliament, Helen.
It's the only way to get things done as one wants them done.
I talked to Dalloway about it. In that case, of course, I should
want Rachel to be able to take more part in things. A certain
amount of entertaining would be necessary — dinners, an occa-
sional evening party. One's constituents like to be fed, I be-
lieve. In all these ways Rachel could be of great help to me.
So," he wound up, "I should be very glad, if we arrange this
visit (which must be upon a business footing, mind), if you
could see your way to helping my girl, bringing her out, —
she's a little shy now, — ^making a woman of her, the kind of
woman her mother would have liked her to be," he ended, jerk-
ing his head at the photograph.

Willoughby's selfishness, though consistent as Helen saw
with real affection for his daughter, made her determined to
have the girl to stay with her, even if she had to promise a
complete course of instruction in the feminine graces. She
could not help laughing at the notion of it — Rachel a Tory
hostess! — and marvelling as she left him at the astonishing
ignorance of a father.

Rachel, when consulted, showed less enthusiasm than Helen
could have wished. One moment she was e^er, the next
doubtful. Visions of a great river, now blue, now yellow in the
tropical sun and crossed by bright birds, now white in the
moon, now deep in shade with moving trees and canoes sliding
out from the tangled banks, beset her. Helen promised a
river. Then she did not want to leave her father. That feel-
ing seemed genuine too, but in the end Helen prevailed, al-
though when she had won her case she was beset by doubts,
and more than once regretted the impulse which had entangled
her with the f ortimes of another human being.

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CHAPTER VII

FROM a distance the Euphrosyne looked very small. Glasses
were turned upon her from the decks of great liners, and
she was pronounced a tramp, a cargo-boat, or one of those
wretched little passenger steamers where people rolled about
among the cattle on deck. The insect-like figures of Dallo-
ways, Ambroses, and Vinraces were also derided, both from
the extreme smallness of their persons and the doubt, which
only strong glasses could dispel, as to whether they were really
live creatures or only lumps on the rigging. Mr. Pepper with
all his learning had been mistaken for a cormorant, and then,
as unjustly, transformed into a cow. At night, indeed, when
the waltzes were swinging in the saloon, and gifted passengers
reciting, the little ship — shrunk to a few beads of light out
among the dark waves, and one high in air upon the mast-head
— ^seemed something mysterious and impressive to heated part-
ners resting from the dance. She became a ship passing in
the night — an emblem of the loneliness of human life, an occa-
sion for queer confidences and sudden appeals for sym-
pathy.

On and on she went, by day and by night, following her path,
until one morning broke and showed the land. Losing its
shadow-like appearance it became first cleft and mountainous,
next coloured grey and purple, next scattered with white blocks
which gradually separated themselves, and then, as the progress
of the ship acted upon the view like a field-glass of increasing
power, became streets of houses. By nine o'clock the Eu-
phrosyne had taken up her position in the middle of a great
bay; she dropped her anchor; immediately, as if she were a
recumbent giant requiring examination, small boats came
swarming about her. She rang with cries ; men jumped on to
her; her deck was thumped by feet. The lonely little island
was invaded from all quarters at once, and after four weeks

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of silence it was bewildering to hear human speech. Mrs.
Ambrose alone heeded none of this stir. She was pale with
suspense while the boat with mail bags was making towards
them. Absorbed in her letters she did not notice that she had
left the Euphrosyne, and felt no sadness when the ship lifted
up her voice and bellowed thrice like a cow separated from its
calf.

"The children are well !" she exclaimed. Mr. Pepper, who
sat cq)posite with a great mound of bag and rug upon his knees,
said, "Gratifjring." Rachel, to whom the end of the voyage
meant a complete change of perspective, was too much be-
wildered by the approach of the shore to realise what children
were well or why it was gratifying. Helen went on reading.

Moving very slowly, and rearing absurdly high over each
wave, the little boat was now approaching a white crescent of
sand. Behind this was a deep green valley, with distinct hiDs
on either side. On the slope of the right-hand hill white
houses with brown roofs were settled, like nesting sea-birds,
and at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars.
Mountains whose sides were flushed with red, but whose
crowns were bald, rose as a pinnacle, half-concealing another
pinnacle behind it. The hour being still early, the whole view
was exquisitely light and airy ; the blues and greens of sky and
tree were intense but not sultry. As tHey drew nearer and
could distinguish details, the effect of the earth with its mi-
nute objects and colours and different forms of life was over-
whelming after four weeks of the sea, and kept them silent.

"Three hundred years odd," said Mr. Pepper meditatively at
length.

As nobody said "What?" he merely extracted a bottle and
swallowed a pill. The piece of information that died within
him was to the effect that three hundred years ago five Eliza-
bethan barques had anchored where the Euphrosyne now
floated. Half -drawn up upon the beach lay an equal number
of Spanish galleons, unmanned, for the country was still a
virgin land behind a veil. Slipping across the water, the Eng-
lish sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen, timbers
of cedar wood, golden crucifixes knobbed with emeralds.
When the Spaniards came down from their drinking, a fight

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ensued, the two parties churning up the sand, and driving each
other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated with fine living
upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps ; but the
hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of
razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and
fingers itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the
dying into the sea, and soon reduced the natives to a state of
superstitious wonderment. Here a settlement was made;
women were imported ; children grew. All seemed to favour
the expansion of the British Empire, and had there been men
like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the map
would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green.
But it must be supposed that the political mind of that age
lacked imagination, and, merely for want of a few thousand
pounds and a few thousand men, the spark died that should
have been a conflagration. From the interior came Indians
with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and painted idols ; from the
sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese; ex-
posed to all these enemies (though the climate proved wonder-
fully kind and the earth abundant) the English dwindled away
and all but disappeared. Somewhere about the middle of the
seventeenth century a single sloop watched its season and
slipped out by night, bearing within it all that was left of the
great British colony, a few men, a few women, and perhaps a
dozen dusky children. English history then denies all knowl-
edge of the place. Owing to one cause and another civilisa-
tion shifted Its centre to a spot some four or five hundred'
miles to the south, and to-day Santa Marina is not much larger
than it was three hundred years ago. In population it is a
happy compromise, for Portuguese fathers wed Indian moth-
ers, and their children intermarry with the Spanish. Al-
though they get their ploughs from Manchester, they make
their coats from their own sheep, their silk from their own
worms, and their furniture from their own cedar trees, so that
in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in
Elizabethan days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea
to found a small colony within the last ten years are not so
easily described, and will never perhaps be recorded in history

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books. Granted facility of travel, peace, good trade, and so
on, there was besides a kind of dissatisfaction among the
English with the older countries and the enormous acctmiula-
tions of carved stone, stained glass, and rich brown painting
which they offered to the tourist. The movement in search of
something new was of course infinitely small, affecting only a
handful of well-to-do people. It began by a few schoolmasters
serving their passage out to South America as the pursers of
tramp steamers. They returned in time for the summer term,
when their stories of the splendours and hardships of life at sea,
the humours of sea-captains, the wonders of night and dawn,
and the marvels of the place delighted outsiders, and some-
times found their way into print. The country itself taxed
all their powers of description, for they said it was much big-
ger than Italy, and really nobler than Greece. Again, they
declared that the natives were strangely beautiful, very big in
stature, dark, passionate, and quick to seize the knife. The
place seemed new and full of new forms of beauty, in proof of
which they showed handkerchiefs which the women had worn
round their heads, and primitive carvings coloured bright
greens and blues. Somehow or other, as fashions do, the
fashion spread; an old monastery was quickly turned into a
hotel, while a famous line of steamships altered its route for
the convenience of passengers.

Oddly enough it happened that the least satisfactory of
Helen Ambrose's brothers had been sent out years before to
make his fortune, at any rate to keep clear of race-horses, in
the very spot which had now become so popular. Often, lean-
ing upon the column in the verandah, he had watched the
English ships with English schoolmasters for pursers steam-
ing into the bay. Having at length earned enough to take a
holiday, and being sick of the place, he proposed to put his
villa, on the slope of the mountain, at his sister's disposal.
She, too, had been a little stirred by the talk of a new world
which went on round her, and the chance, when they were
planning where to spend the winter out of England, seemed
too good to be missed. For these reasons she determined
to accept Willoughby^s offer of free passages on his ship, to

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place the children with their grand-parents, and to do the thing
thoroughly while she was about it.

Taking seats in a carriage drawn by long-tailed horses with
pheasants' feathers erect between their ears, the Ambroses,
Mr. Pepper, and Rachel rattled out of the harbour. The day
increased in heat as they drove up the hill. The road passed
through the town, where men seemed to be beating brass and
crying "Water," where the passage was blocked by mules and
cleared by whips and curses, where the women walked bare-
foot, their heads balancing baskets, and cripples hastily dis-
played mutilated members ; it issued among steep green fields,
not so green but that the earth showed through. Great trees
now shaded all but the centre of the road, and a mountain
stream, so shallow and so swift that it plaited itself into strands
as it ran, raced along the edge. . ^Higher they went, until Ridley
and Rachel walked behind ; next they turned along a lane scat-
tered with stones, where Mr. Pepper raised his stick and
silently indicated a shrub, bearing among sparse leaves a
voluminous purple blossom ; and at a rickety canter the last
stage of the way was accomplished.

The villa was a roomy white house, which, as is the case with
most continental houses, looked to an English eye frail, ram-
shackle, and absurdly frivolous, more like a pagoda in a tea-
garden than a place where one slept. The garden called ur-
gently for the services of gardener. Bushes waved their
branches across the paths, and the blades of grass, with spaces
of earth between them, could be counted. In the circular piece
of ground in front of the verandah were two cracked vases,
from which red flowers drooped, with a stone fountain between
them, now parched in the sun. The circular garden led to a
long garden, where the gardener's shears had scarcely been,
unless now and then, when he cut a bough of blossom for his
beloved. A few tall trees shaded it, and round bushes with
wax-like flowers mobbed their heads together in a row. A
garden smoothly laid with turf, divided by thick hedges, with
raised beds of bright flowers, such as we keep within walls in
England, would have been out of place upon the side of this
bare hill. There was no ugliness to shut out, and the villa

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looked straight across the shoulder of a slope, ribbed with
olive trees, to the sea.

The indecency of the whole place struck Mrs. Chailey forci-
bly. There were no blinds to shut out the sun, nor was there
any furniture to speak of for the sun to spoil. Standing in
the bare stone hall, and survejring a staircase of superb breadth,
but cracked and carpetless, she further ventured the opinion
that there were rats, as large as terriers at home, and that if
one put one's foot down with any force one would come
through the floor. As for hot water — ^at this point her investi-
gations left her speechless.

"Poor creature !" she murmured to the sallow Spanish serv-
ant-girl who came out with the pigs and hens to receive them,
"no wonder you hardly look like a human being f" Maria ac-
cepted the compliment with an exquisite Spanish grace. In
Chailey's opinion they would have done well to stay on board
an English ship, but none knew better than she that her duty
commanded her to stay.

When they were settled in, and in train to find daily occu-
pation, there was some speculation as to the reasons which in-
duced Mr. Pepper to stay, taking up his lodging in the Am-
brose's house. Efforts had been made for some days before
landing to impress upon him the advantages of the Amazons.

"That great stream!" Helen would begin, gazing as if she
saw a visionary cascade, "I've a good mind to go with you
myself, Willoughby — only I can't. Think of the sunsets and
the moonrises — I believe the colours are unimaginable.

"There are wild peacocks," Rachel hazarded.

"And marvellous creatures in the water," Helen asserted.

"One might discover a new reptile," Rachel continued.

"There's certain to be a revolution, I'm told," Helen urged.

The effect of these subterfuges was a little dashed by Ridley,
who, after regarding Pepper for some moments, sighed aloud,
"Poor fellow !" and inwardly speculated upon the unkindness
of women.

Mr. Pepper stayed, however, in apparent contentment for
six days, playing with a microscope and a notebook in one of
the many sparsely furnished sitting-rooms, but on the evening
of the seventh day, as they sat at dinner, he appeared more

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restless than usual. The dinner-table was set between two
long windows which were left uncurtained by Helen's orders.
Darkness fell as sharply as a knife in this climate, and the town
then sprang out in circles and lines of bright dots beneath them.
Buildings which never showed by day showed by night, and the
sea flowed right over the land judging by the moving lights of
the steamers. The sight fulfilled the same purpose as an or-
chestra in a Londan restaurant, and silence had its setting.
William Pepper observed it for some time ; he put on his spec-
tacles to contemplate the scene.

"I've identified the big block to the left," he observed, and
pointed with his fork at a square formed by several rows of
lights.

"One should infer that they can cook vegetables," he added.

"An hotel?" said Helen.

"Once a monastery," said Mr. Pepper.

Nothing more was said then, but, the day after, Mr. Pepper
returned from a midday walk, and stood silently before Helen
who was reading in the verandah.

"I've taken a room over there," he said.

"You're not going?" she exclaimed.

"On the whole — yes," he remarked. "No private cook can
cook vegetables."

Knowing his dislike of questions, which she to some extent
shared, Helen asked no more. Still, an uneasy suspicion
lurked in her mind that William was hiding a wound. She
flushed to think that her words, or her husband's, or Rachel's
had penetrated and stung. She was half-moved to cry, "Stop,
William; explain!" and would have returned to the subject at
luncheon if William had not shown himself inscrutable and
chill, lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with
the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, sus-
pecting germs.

"If you all die of typhoid I won't be responsible!" he
snapped.

"If you die of duhiess, neither will I," Helen echoed in her
heart.

She reflected that she had never yet asked him whether he
had been in love. They had got further and further from that

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subject instead of drawing nearer to it, and she could not help
f eeUng it a relief when William Pepper, with all his knowledge,
his microscope, his note-books, his genuine kindliness and good
sense, but a certain dryness of soul, took his departure. Also
she could not help feeling it sad that friendships should end
thus, although in this case to have the room empty was some-
thing of a comfort, and she tried to console herself with the
reflection that one never knows how far other people feel the
things one would certainly feel in their place.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE next few months passed away, as many years can pass
away, without definite events, and yet, if suddenly dis-
turbed, it would be seen that such months or years had a char-
acter unlike others. The three months which had passed had
brought them to the beginning of March. The climate had
kept Its promise, and the change of season from winter ta
spring had made very little difference, so that Helen, who was
sitting in the drawing-room with a pen in her hand, could keep
the windows open though a great fire of logs burnt on one side
of her. Below, the sea was stillblue and the roofs still brown
and white, though the day was fading rapidly. It was dusk in
the room, which, large and empty at all times, now appeared
larger and emptier than usual. Her own figure, as she sat
writing with a pad on her knee, shaded the general effect of
size and lack of detail, for the fiames which ran along the
branches, suddenly devouring little green tufts, burnt intermit-
tently and sent irregular illuminations across her face and the
plaster walls. There were no pictures on the walls but here
and there boughs laden with heavy-petalled flowers spread
widely against them. Of the books fallen on the bare floor and
heaped upon the large table, it was only possible in this light
to trace the outline.

Mrs. Ambrose was writing a very long letter. Beginning
"Dear Bernard," it went on to describe what had been happen-
ing in the Villa San Gervasio during the past three months,
as, for instance, that they had had the British Consul to din-
ner, and had been taken over a Spanish man-of-war, and had
seen a great many processions and religious festivals, which
were so beautiful that Mrs. Ambrose couldn't conceive why,
if people must have a religion, they didn't all become Roman
Catholics. They had made several expeditions though none
of any length. It was worth coming if only for the sake of
the flowering trees which grew wild quite near the house, and

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the amazing colours of sea and earth. The earth, instead of
being brown, was red, purple, green. "You won't believe me,"
she added, "there is no colour like it in England." She
adopted, indeed, a condescending tone towards that poor island,
which was now advancing chilly crocuses and nipped violets
in nooks, in copses, in cosy comers, tended by rosy old garden-
ers in mufflers, who were always touching their hats and bob-
bing obsequiously. She went on to deride the islanders them-
selves. Rumours of London all in a ferment over a General
Election had reached them even out here. "It seems incredi-
ble," she went on, "that people should care whether Asquith
is in or Austen Chamberlain out, and while you scream your-
selves hoarse about politics you let the only people who are
trying for something good starve or simply laugh at them.
When have you ever encouraged a living artist? Or bought
his best work ? Why are you all so ugly and so servile ? Here
the servants are human beings. They talk to one as if they
were equals. As far as I can tell there are no aristocrats."

Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her
of Richard Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same
penful to describe her niece.

"It's an odd fate that has put me in charge of a girl," she
wrote, "considering that I have never got on well with women,
or had much to do with them. However, I must retract some
of the things that I have said against them. If they were prop-
erly educated I don't see why they shouldn't be much the same
as men — as satisfactory I mean; though, of course, very dif-
ferent. The question is, how should one educate them ? The
present method seems to me abominable. This girl, though
twenty-four, had never heard that men desired women, and,
until I explained it, did not know how children were bom. Her
ignorance upon other matters as important" (here Mrs. Am-
brose's letter may not be quoted) . . . "was complete. It
seems to me not merely foolish but criminal to bring people up
like that. Let alone the suffering to them, it explains why
women are what they are — ^the wonder is they're no worse.
I have taken it upon myself to enlighten her, and now, though
still a good deal prejudiced and liable to exaggerate, she is
more or less a reasonable human being. Keeping them ig-

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norant, of course, defeats its own object, and when they begin
to understand they take it all much too seriously. My brother-
in-law really deserved a catastrophe — which he won't get. I
now pray for a young man to come to my help; some one, I
mean, who would talk to her openly, and prove how absurd
most of her ideas about life are. Unluckily such men seem
almost as rare as the women. The English colony certainly
doesn't provide one; artists, merchants, culitvated people —
they are stupid, conventional, and flirtatious. . . ." She
ceased, and with her pen in her hand sat looking into the fire,
making the logs into caves and mountains, for it had grown
too dark to go on writing. Moreover, the house began to stir
as the hour of dinner approached; she could hear the plates
being chinked in the dining-room next door, and Chailey in-
structing the Spanish girl where to put things down in vigorous
English. The bell rang; she rose, met Ridley and Rachel out-
side, and they all went in to dinner.

Three months had made but little difference in the appear-
ance either of Ridley or Rachel; yet a keen observer might
have thought that the girl was more definite and self-confident
in her manner than before. Her skin was brown, her eyes
certainly brighter, and she attended to what was said as though
she might be going to contradict it. The meal began with the
comfortable silence of people who are quite at their case to-
gether. Then Ridley, leaning on his elbow and looking out of
the window, observed that it was a lovely night.

"Yes," said Helen. She added, "The season's begun," look-
ing at the lights beneath them. She asked Maria in Spanish
whether the hotel was not filling up with visitors. Maria in-
formed her with pride that there would come a time when it
was positively difficult to buy eggs — ^the shopkeepers would not
mind what prices they asked, for they would get them, at any
rate, from the English.

"That's an English steamer in the bay," said Rachel, looking
at a triangle of lights below. She came in early this mom-
mg.

"Then we may hope for some letters and send ours back,"
said Helen.

For some reason the mention of letters always made Ridley

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groan, and the rest of the meal passed in a brisk argument
between husband and wife as to whether he was or was not
wholly ignored by the entire civilised world.

"Considering the last batch," said Helen, "you deserve beat-
ing. You were asked to lecture, you were offered a degree,
and some silly woman praised not only your books but your
beauty — she said he was what Shelley Would have been if
Shelley had lived to fifty-five and grown a beard. Really,
Ridley, I think youYe the vainest man I know," she ended, ris-
ing from the table, "which I may tell you is sa)nng a good deal."

Finding her letter lying before the fire she added a few lines
to it, and then announced that she was going to take the letters
now — Ridley must bring his — and Rachel ?

"I hope you've written to your Aunts ? It's high time.'*

The women put on cloaks and hats, and after inviting Rid-
ley to come with them, which he emphatically refused to do,
exclaiming that Rachel he expected to be a fool, but Helen
surely knew better, they turned to go. He stood over the fire
gazing into the depths of the looking-glass, and compressing
his face into the likeness of a commander survejring a field of
battle, or a martyr watching the flames lick his toes, rather than
that of a secluded Professor.

Helen laid hold of his beard.

"Am I a fool?" she said.

"Let me go, Helen."

"Am I a fool ?" she repeated.

"Vile woman !" he exclaimed, and kissed her.

"We'll leave you to your vanities," she called back as they
went out of the door.

It was a beautiful evening, still light enough to see a long
way down the road, though the stars were coming out. The
pillar-box was let into a high yellow wall where the lane met
the road, and having dropped the letters into it, Helen was for
turning back.

"No, no," said Rachel, taking her by the wrist. "We're go-
ing to see life. You promised."

"Seeing life" was the phrase they used for their habit of
strolling through the town after dark. The social life of Santa
Marina was carried on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the

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warmth of the nights and the scents culled from flowers made
pleasant enough. The young women, with their hair magnifi-
cently swept in coils, a red flower behind the ear, sat on the
doorsteps, or issued out on to balconies, while the young men
ranged up and down beneath, shouting up a greeting from time
to time and stopping here and there to enter into amorous talk.
At the open windows merchants could be seen making up the
day's account, and older women lifting jars from shelf to shelf.
The streets were full of people, men for the most part, who in-
terchanged their views of the world as they walked, or gath-
ered round the wine-tables at the street comer, where an old
cripple was twanging his guitar strings, while a poor girl cried
her passionate song in the gutter. The two Englishwomen ex-
cited some friendly curiosity, but no one molested them.

Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their
shabby clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with
satisfaction.

"Just think of the Mall to-night !" she exclaimed at length.
"It's the fifteenth of March. Perhaps there's a Court." She
thought of the crowd waiting in the cold spring air to see
the grand carriages go by. "It's very cold, if it's not raining,"
she said. "First there are men selling picture postcards ; then
there are wretched little shop-girls with round bandboxes ; then
there are bank clerks in tail coats ; and then — any number of
dressmakers. People from South Kensington drive up in a
hired fly ; officials have a pair of bays ; earls, on the other hand,
are allowed one footman to stand up behind ; dukes have two,
royal dukes — ^so I was told — ^have three ; the king, I suppose,
can have as many as he likes. And the people believe in il !"

Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be
shaped in the body like the kings and queens, knights and
pawns of the chessboard, so strange were their differences, so
marked and so implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

"They believe in God," said Rachel as they regained each
other. She meant that the people in the crowd believed in
Him; for she remembered the crosses with bleeding plaster
figures that stood where foot-paths joined, and the inexplicable
mystery of a service in a Roman Catholic church.

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"We shall never understand !" she sighed.

They had walked some way and it was now night, but they
could see a large iron gate a little way farther down the road
on their left.

"Do you mean to go right up to the hotel ?" Helen asked.

Rachel gave the gate a push ; it swung open, and, seeing no
one about and judging that nothing was private in this country,
they walked straight on. An avenue of trees ran along the
road, which was completely straight. The trees suddenly came
to an end ; the road turned a corner, and they found themselves
confronted by a large square building. They had come out
upon the board terrace which ran round the hotel and were
only a few feet distant from the windows. A row of long
windows opened almost to the ground. They were all of them
uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see
everything inside. Each window revealed a different section
of the life of the hotel. They drew into one of the broad col-
umns of shadow which separated the windows and gazed in.
They found themselves just outside the dining-room. It was
being swept ; a waiter was eating a bunch of grapes with his
leg across the corner of a table. Next door was the kitchen,
where they were washing up ; white cooks were dipping their
arms into cauldrons, while the waiters made their meal vo-
raciously off broken meats, sopping up the gravy with bits of
crumb. Moving on, they became lost in a plantation of bushes,
and then suddenly found themselves outside the drawing-room,
where the ladies and gentlemen, having dined well, lay back in
deep armchairs, occasionally speaking or turning over the pages
of magazines. A thin woman was flourishing up and down the
piano.

"What is a dahabeeyah, Charles?" the distinct voice of a
widow, seated in an arm-chair by the window, asked her son.

It was the end of the piece, and his answer was lost in the
general clearing of throats and tapping of knees.

"They're all old in this room," Rachel whispered.

Creeping on, they found that the next window revealed two
men in shirt-sleeves playing billiards with two young ladies.

"He pinched my arm !" the plump young woman cried, a4 she
missed her stroke.

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"Now you two — ^no ragging/' the young man with the red
face reproved them, who was marking.

"Take care or we shall be seen," whispered Helen, plucking
Rachel by the arm. Incautiously her head had risen to the
middle of the window.

Turning the comer they came to the largest room in the
hotel, which was supplied with four windows, and was called
the Lounge, although it was really a hall. Hung with armour
and native embroideries, furnished with divans and screens,
which shut off convenient comers, the room was less formal
than the others, and was evidently the haunt of youth. Signor
Rodriguez, whom they knew to be the manager of the hotel,
stood quite near them in the doorway surveying the scene — ^the
gentlemen lounging in chairs, the couples leaning over coffee-
cups, the game of cards in the centre under profuse clusters of
electric light. He was congratulating himself upon the enter-
prise which had turned the refectory, a cold stone room with
pots on trestles, into the most comfortable room in the house.
The hotel was very full, and proved his wisdom in decreeing
that no hotel can flourish without a lounge.

The people were scattered about in couples or parties of
four, and either they were actually better acquainted, or the
informal room made their ^manners easier. Through the open
window came an uneven humming sound like that which rises
from a flock of sheep pent within hurdles at dusk. The card-
party occupied the centre of the foreground.

Helen and Rachel watched them play for some minutes
without being able to distinguish a word. Helen was observ-
ing one of the men intently. He was a lean, somewhat cadav-
erous man of about her own age, whose profile was turned to
them, and he was the partner of a highly-coloured girl, ob-
viously English by birth.

Suddenly, in the strange way in which some words detach
themselves from the rest, they heard him say quite dis-
tinctly: —

"All you want is practice. Miss Warrington; courage and
practice — one's no good without the other."

"Hughling Elliot! Of course!" Helen exclaimed. She
ducked her head immediately, for at the sound of his name he

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looked up. The game went on for a few minutes, and was
then broken up by the approach of a wheeled chair, containing
a voluminous old lady who paused by the table and said : —

"Better luck to-night, Susan?"

"All the luck's on our side," said a young man who until now
had kept his back turned to the window. He appeared to be
rather stout, and had a thick crop of hair.

"Luck, Mr. Hewet?" said his partner, a middle-aged lady
with spectacles. "I assure you, Mrs. Paley, our success is due
solely to our brilliant play."

"Unless I go to bed early I get practically no sleep at all,"
Mrs. Paley was heard to explain, as if to justify her seizure of
Susan, who got up and proceeded to wheel the chair to the
door.

"They'll get some one else to take my place," she said cheer-
fully. But she was wrong. No attempt was made to find an-
other player, and after the young man had built three stories of
a card-house, which fell down, the players strolled oflf in dif-
ferent directions.

Mr. Hewet turned his full face towards the window. They
could see that he had large eyes obscured by glasses ; his com-
plexion was rosy; his lips clean-shaven; and, seen among or-
dinary people, it appeared to be an interesting face. He came
straight towards them, but his eyes were fixed not upon the
eavesdroppers but upon a spot where the curtain hung in folds.

"Asleep?" he said.

Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been
sitting near to them unobserved all the time. There were legs
in the shadow. A melancholy voice issued from above them.

"Two women," it said.

A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled.
They did not stop running until they felt certain that no eye
could penetrate the darkness, and the hotel was only a square
shadow in the distance, with red holes regularly cut in its
blankness.

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CHAPTER IX

AN hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew
dim and were almost deserted, while the little box-like
squares above them were brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or
fifty people were going to bed. The thump of jugs set down
on the floor above could be heard and the chink of china, for
there was not as thick a partition between the rooms as one
might wish, so Miss Allan, the elderly lady who had been play-
ing bridge, determined, giving the wall a smart rap with her
knuckles. It was only matchboard, she decided, run up to
make many little rooms of one large one. Her grey petticoats
slipped to the ground, and, stooping, she folded her clothes
with neat, if not loving fingers, screwed her hair into a plait,
wound her father's great gold watch, and opened the complete
works of Wordsworth. She was reading the "Prelude," partly
because she always read the "Prelude" abroad^ and partly be-
cause she was engaged in writing a short Primer of English
Literature — Beowulf to Swinburne — which would have a para-
graph on Wordsworth. She was deep in the fifth book, stop-
ping indeed to pencil a note, when a pair of boots dropped, one
after another, on the floor above her. She looked up and spec-
ulated. Whose boots were they, she wondered. She then be-
came aware of a swishing sound next door — z woman, clearly,
putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping
sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It was
very difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the "prelude."
Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, how-
ever, to read to the end of the book, when she placed a mark
between the pages, sighed contentedly, and then turned out the
light.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like
in shape as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read
her book, Susan Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages

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have consecrated this hour, and the most majestic of all do-
mestic actions, to talk of love between women ; but Miss War-
rington being alone could not talk; she could only look with
extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned
her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way
now that; and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered
herself seriously.

"I'm nice-looking," she determined. "Not pretty — ^possibly,"
she drew herself up a little. "Yes — ^most people would say I
was handsome."

She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say.
Her feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not
admit to herself that she was in love with him or that she
wanted to marry him, yet she spent every minute when she was
alone in wondering what he thought of her, and in comparing
what they had done to-day with what they had done the day
before.

"He didn't ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into
the hall," she meditated, summing up the evening. She was
thirty years of age, and owing to the number of her sisters and
the seclusion of life in a country parsonage had as yet had no
proposal of marriage. The hour of confidences was often a
sad one, and she had been known to jump into bed, treating
her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in com-
parison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red
lying upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined,
but her serious anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she
exclaimed, "Oh, but I'm forgetting," and went to her writing-
table. A brown volume lay there stamped with the figure of
the year. She proceeded to write in the square ugly hand of a
mature child, as she wrote daily year after year, keeping the
diaries, though she seldom looked at them.

"a.m. — Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours.
She knows the Manns ; also the Selby-Carroways. How small
the world is! Like her. Read a chapter of Miss Appleby s
Adventure to Aunt E. p.m. — Played lawn-tennis with Mr.
Perrott and Evelyn M. Don't like Mr. P. Have a feeling
that he is not 'quite,' though clever certainly. Beat them. Day

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splendid, view wonderful. One gets used to no trees, though
much too bare at first. Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful,
though twingy, she says. Mem. : ask about damp sheets.'*

She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the
blankets comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her
breathing showed that she was asleep. With its profoundly
peaceful sighs and hesitations it resembled that of a cow stand-
ing up to its knees all night through in the long grass.

A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose,
prominent above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the dark-
ness, for the windows were open and showed grey squares
with splinters of starlight, one could distinguish a lean form,
terribly like the body of a dead person, the body indeed of
William Pepper, asleep too. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-
eight — here were three Portuguese men of business, asleep
presumably, since a snore came with the regularity of a great
ticking clodc. Thirty-nine was a corner room, at the end of
the passage, but late though it was — "one" struck gently down-
stairs — a line of light under the door showed that some one
was still awake.

"How late you are, Hugh !'* a woman, lying in bed, said in a
peevish but solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his
teeth, and for some moments did not answer.

"You should have gone to sleep," he replied. "I was talking
to Thornbury."

"But you know that I never can sleep when I'm waiting for
you," she said.

To that he made no answer, but only remarked, "Well then,
we'll turn out the light." They were silent.

The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now
be heard in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hun-
gry but without her spectacles, was summoning her maid to
find the biscuit-box. The maid having answered the bell,
dfearily respectful even at this hour though muffled in a mack-
intosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs all was
€mpty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in
the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss
Allan's head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours
previously, in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist

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entirely of legs. Deep in an annchair he was reading the
third volume of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of
Rome by candle light. As he read he knocked the ash auto-
matically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the
page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered
his capacious brow and went marching through his brain in
order. It seemed likely that this process might continue for
an hour or more, until the entire regiilient had shifted its quar-
ters, had not the door opened, and the young man, who was in-
clined to be stout, come in with large naked feet.

"Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was "

"Two minutes," said Hirst, raising his finger.

He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.

"What was it you forgot to say ?" he asked.

"D'you think you do make enough allowance for feelings ?"
asked Mr. Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant
to say.

After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr.
Hirst smiled at the question of his friend. He laid aside his
book and considered.

"I should call yours a singularly untidy mind," he observed.
"Feelings? Aren't they just what we do allow for? We put
love up there, and all the rest somewhere down below." With
his left hand he indicated the top of a pyramid, and with his
right the base.

"But you didn't get out of bed to tell me that," he added
severely.

"I got out of bed," said Hewet vaguely, "merely to talk I
suppose."

"Meanwhile I shall undress," said Hirst. When naked of
all but his shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer
impressed one with the majesty of his intellect, but with the
pathos of his young yet ugly body, for he stooped, and he was
so thin that there were dark lines between the different bones
of his neck and shoulders.

"Women interest me," said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed
with his chin resting on his knees, paid no attention to the un-
dressing of Mr. Hirst.

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"They're so stupid/* said Hirst. "You're sitting on my pyja-
mas."

"I suppose they ore stupid ?" Hewet wondered.

"There can't be two opinions about that, I iitiagine," said
Hirst, hopping briskly across the room, "unless you're in love
— ^that fat woman Warrington ?" he enquired.

"Not one fat woman — ^all fat women," Hewet sighed.

"The women I saw to-night were not fat," said Hirst, who
was taking advantage of Hewet's company to cut his toe-nails.

"Describe them," said Hewet.

"You know I can't describe things!" said Hirst. "They
were much like other women, I should think. They always
are.

"No; that's where we differ," said Hewet. "I say every-
thing's different. No two people are in the least the same.
Take you and me now."

"So I used to think once," said Hirst. "But now they're
all types. Don't take us, — ^take this hotel. You could draw
circles round the whole lot of them, and they'd never stray
outside."

("You can kill a hen by doing that"), Hewet murmured.

"Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr.
and Mrs. Thornbury — one cricle," Hirst continued. "Miss
Warrington, Mr. Arthur Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. an-
other circle; then there are a whole lot of natives; finally our-
selves,"

"Are we all alone in our circle ?" asked Hewet.

"Quite alone," $aid Hirst. "You try to get out, but you
can't. You only make a mess of things by trying."

"I'm not a hen in a circle," said Hewet. "I'm a dove on a
tree-top."

"I wonder if this is what they call an ingrowing toe-nail?"
said Hirst, examining the big toe on his left foot.

"I flit from branch to branch," continued Hewet. "The
world is profoundly pleasant." He lay back on the bed, upon
his arms.

"I wonder if it's really nice to be as vague as you are?" asked
Hirst, looking at him. "It's the lack of continuity — ^that's
what's so odd about you," he went on. "At the age of twenty-

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seven, which is nearly thirty, you seem to have drawn no con-
clusions. A party of old women excites you still as though you
were three/*

Hewet contemplated the angular young man who was neatly
brushing the rims of his toe-nails into the fireplace in silence
for a moment.

"I respect you, Hirst," he remarked.

"I envy you — some things," said Hirst. "One : your capac-
ity for not thinking ; two : people like you better than they like
me. Women like you, I suppose."

"I wonder whether that isn't really what matters most ?" said
Hewet. Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague
circles above him.

"Of course it is," said Hirst. "But that's not the difficulty.
The difficulty is, isn't it, to find an appropriate object?"

"There are no female hens in your circle?" asked Hewet.

"Not the ghost of one," said Hirst.

Although they had known each other for three years Hirst
had never yet heard the true story of Hewet's loves. In gen-
eral conversation it was taken for granted that they were many,
but in private the subject was allowed to lapse. The fact that
he had money enough to do no work, and that he had left Cam-
bridge after two terms owing to a difference with the authori-
ties, and had then travelled and drifted, made his life strange
at many points where his friends' lives were much of a piece.

"I don't see your circles — I don't see them," Hewet con-
tinued. "I see a thing like a teetotum spinning in and out —
knocking into things — dashing from side to side — collecting
numbers — more and more and more, till the whole place is thick
with them. Round and round they go — out there, over the rim
— out of sight."

His fingers showed that the waltzing teetotums had spun over
the edge of the counterpane and fallen oil the bed into infinity.

"Could you contemplate three weeks alone in this hotd?"
asked Hirst, after a moment's pause.

Hewet proceeded to think.

"The truth of it is that one never is alone, and one never is
in company," he concluded.

"Meaning?" said Hirst.

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"Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles — auras — ^what
d'you call 'em ? You can't see my bubble ; I can't see yours ; all
we see of each other is a speck, like the wick in the middle
of that flame. The flame goes about with us everywhere ; it's
not ourselves exactly, but what we feel ; the world is short, or
people mainly ; all kinds of people."

"A nice streaky bubble yours must be !" said Hirst.

"And supposing my bubble could run into some one else's
bubble "

"And they both burst ?" put in Hirst.

"Then — then — then — " pondered Hewet, as if to himself, "it
would be an e — nor — mous world," he said, stretching his arms
to their full width, as though even so they could hardly clasp
the billowy universe, for when he was with Hirst he always
felt unusually sanguine and vague.

"I don't think you altogether as foolish as I used to, Hewet,"
said Hirst. "You don't know what you mean but you try to
say it."

"But aren't you enjoying yourself here ?" asked Hewet.

"On the whole — ^yes," said Hirst. "I like observing people.
I like looking at things. This country is amazingly beautiful.
Did you notice how the top of the mountain turned yellow to-
night ? Really we must take our lunch and spend the day out.
You're getting disgustingly fat." He pointed at the calf of
Hewet's bare leg.

"We'll get up an expedition," said Hewet energetically.
''We'll ask the entire hotel. We'll hire donkeys and "

"Oh, Lord !" said Hirst, "do shut it ! I can see Miss War-
rington and Miss Allan and Mrs. Elliot and the rest squatting
on the stones and quacking, 'How jolly !' "

"We'll ask Venning and Perrott and Miss Murgatroyd —
every one we can lay hands on," went on Hewet. "What's the
name of the little old grasshopper with the eyeglasses ? Pep-
per ? — Pepper shall lead us."

"Thank God, you'll never get the donkeys," said Hirst.

"I must make a note of that," said Hewet, slowly dropping
his feet to the floor. "Hirst escorts Miss Warrington ; Pepper
advances alone on a white ass ; provisions equally distributed —

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or shall we hire a mule? The matrons — ^there's Mrs. Paley, by
Jove ! — share a carriage/'

"That's where you'll go wrong," said Hirst. "Putting vir-
gins among matrons."

"How long should you think that an expedition like that
would take, Hirst ?" asked Hewet.

"From twelve to sixteen hours I should say," said Hirst
"The time usually occupied by a first confinement."

"It will need considerable organisation," said Hewet. He
was now padding softly round the room, and stopped to stir
the books on the table. They lay heaped one upon another.

"We shall want some poets too," he remarked. "Not Gib-
bon ; no ; d'you happen to have Modern Love or John Donne?
You see, I contemplate pauses when people get tired of looking
at the view, and then it would be nice to read something rather
difficult aloud."

"Mrs. Paley will enjoy herself," said Hirst.

"Mrs. Paley will enjoy it certainly," said Hewet. "It's one
of the saddest things I know — ^the way elderly ladies cease to
read poetry. And yet how appropriate this is :

I speak as one who plumbs

Life's dim profound,
One who at length can sound

Gear views and certain.
But — ^after love what comes?

A scene that lours,
A few sad vacant hours.

And then, the Curtain.

I daresay Mrs. Paley is the only one of us who can really un-
derstand that."

"We'll ask her," said Hirst. "Please, Hewet, if you must go
to bed, draw my curtain. Few things distress me more than
the moonlight."

Hewet retreated, pressing the poems of Thomas Hardy be-
neath his arm, and in their beds next door to each other both
the young men were soon asleep.

Between the extinction of Hewet's candle and the rising of a
dusky Spanish boy who was the first to survey the desolation
of the hotel in the early morning, a few hours of silence inter-

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vened. One could almost hear a hundred people breathing^
deeply, and however wakeful and restless it would have been
hard to escape sleep in the middle of so much sleep. Looking
out of the windows, thtrt was only darkness to be seen. All
over the shadowed half of the world people lay prone, and a
few flickering lights in empty streets marked the places where
their cities were built. Red and yellow omnibuses were crowd-
ing each other in Piccadilly; sumptuous women were rocking
at a standstill ; but here in the darkness an owl flitted from tree
to tree, and when the breeze lifted the branches the moon
flashed as if it were a torch. Until all people should awake
again the houseless animals were abroad, the tigers and the
stags, and the elephants coming down in the darkness to drink
at pools. The wind at night blowing over the hills and woods
was purer and fresher than the wind by day, and the earth,
robbed of detail, more mysterious than the earth coloured and
divided by roads and fields. For six hours this profound
beauty existed, and then as the east grew whiter and whiter the
ground swam to the surface, the roads were revealed, the
smoke rose and the people stirred, and the sun shone upon the
windows of the hotel at Santa Marina until they were uncur-
tained, and the gong blaring all through the house gave notice
of breakfast.

Directly breakfast was over, the ladies as usual circled
vaguely, picking up papers and putting them down again, about
the hall.

"And what are you going to do to-day?*' asked Mrs. Elliot^
drifting up against Miss Warrington.

Mrs. Elliot, the wife of Hughling the Oxford Don, was a
short woman, whose expression was habitually plaintive. Her
eyes moved from thing to thing as though they never found
anything sufficiently pleasant to rest upon for any length of
time.

"I'm going to try to get Aunt Emma out into the town," said
Susan. "She's not seen a thing yet."

"I call it so spirited of her at her age," said Mrs. Elliot,,
"coming all this way from her own fireside,"

"Yes, we always tell her she'll die on board ship/* Susan re-
plied. "She was born qp. one/* she added.

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"In the old days," said Mrs. Elliot, "a great many people
were. I always pity the poor women so ! We've got a lot to
complain of !" She shook her head. Her eyes wandered about
the table, and she remarked irrelevantly, "The poor little Queen
of Holland! Newspaper reporters practically, one may say,
at her bedroom door !"

"Were you talking of the Queen of Holland?" said the pleas-
ant voice of Miss Allan, who was searching for the thick pages
of The Times among a litter of thin foreign sheets.

"I always envy any one who lives in such an excessively flat
country," she remarked.

"How very strange !" said Mrs. Elliot. "I find a flat coun-
try so depressing."

"I'm afraid you can't be very happy here then, Miss Allan,"
said Susan.

"On the contrary," said Miss Allan, "I am exceedingly fond
of mountains." Perceiving The Times at some distance, she
moved off to secure it.

"Well, I must find my husband," said Mrs. Elliot, fidgeting
away.

"And I must go to my aimt," said Miss Warrington, and tak-
ing up the duties of the day they moved away.

Whether the flimsiness of foreign sheets and the coarseness
of their type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is
no doubt that English people scarcely consider news read there
as news, any more than a programme bought from a man in
the street on the occasion of a public ceremony inspires con-
fidence in what it says. A very respectable elderly pair, hav-
ing inspected the long tables of newspapers, did not think it
worth their while to read more than the headlines.

"The debate on the fifteenth should have reached us by
now," Mrs. Thombury murmured. Mr. Thornbury, who was
beautifully clean and had red rubbed into his handsome worn
face like traces of paint on a weather-beaten wooden figure,
looked over his glasses and saw that Miss Allan had The
Times.

The couple therefore sat themselves down in arm-chairs and
waited.

"Ah, there's Mr. Hewet," said Mrs. Thombury. "Mr.

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Hewet/' she continued, "do come and sit by us. I was telling
my husband how much you reminded me of a dear old friend
of mine — Mary Umpleby. She was a most delightful woman,
I assure you. She grew roses. We used to stay with her in
the old days."

"No yoimg man likes to have it said that he resembles an
elderly spinster," said Mr. Thombury.

"On the contrary," said Mr. Hewet, "I always think it a com-
pliment to remind people of some one else. But Miss Umpleby
— why did she grow roses ?"

"Ah, poor thing," said Mrs. Thornbury, "that's a long story.
She had gone through dreadful sorrows. At one time I think
she would have lost her senses if it hadn't been for her gar-
den. The soil was very much against her — ^a blessing in dis-
guise; she had to be up at dawn — out in all weathers. And
then there are creatures that eat roses. But she triumphed.
She always did. She was a brave soul." She sighed deeply
but at the same time with resignation.

"I did not realise that I was monopolising the paper," said
Miss Allan, coming up to them.

"We were so anxious to read about the debate," said Mrs.
Thombury, accepting it on behalf of her husband.

"One doesn't realise how interesting a debate can be until
one has sons in the navy. My interests are equally balanced,
though ; I have sons in the army too ; and one son who makes
speeches at the Union — ^my baby!"

"Hirst would know him, I expect," said Hewet.

"Mr. Hirst has such an interesting face," said Mrs. Thom-
bury. "But I feel one ought to be very clever to talk to him.
Well, William?" she enquired, for Mr. Thombury grunted.

"They're making a mess of it," said Mr. Thombury. He
had reached the second column of the report, a spasmodic
column, for the Irish members had been brawling three weeks
ago at Westminster over a question of naval efficiency. After
a disturbed paragraph or two, the column of print once more
ran smoothly.

"You have read it?" Mrs. Thombury asked Miss Allan.

"No, I am ashamed to say I have only read about the dis-
coveries in Crete," said Miss Allan.

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"Oh, but I would give so much to realise the ancient world T
cried Mrs. Thombury. "Now that we old people are alone, —
we're on our second honeymoon, — I am really going to put
myself to school again. After all we are founded on the past,
aren't we, Mr. Hewet ? My soldier son says that there is still
a great deal to be learnt from Hannibal. One ought to know
so much more than one does. Somehow when I read the
paper, I begin with the debates first, and, before I've done,
the door always opens — we're a very large party at home — ^and
so one never does think enough about the ancients and all
they've done for us. But you begin at the beginning. Miss
Allan."

"When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black
men," said Miss Allan, "which is quite incorrect, I'm sure."

"And you, Mr. Hirst ?" said Mrs. Thornbury, perceiving that
the gaunt young man was near. "I'm sure you read every-
thing."

"I confine myself to cricket and crime," said Hirst. "The
worst of coming from the upper classes," he continued, "is
that one's friends are never killed in railway accidents."

Mr. Thornbury threw down the paper, and emphatically
dropped his eyeglasses. The sheets fell in the middle of the
group, and were eyed by them all.

"It's not gone well?" asked his wife solicitously.

Hewet picked up one sheet and read, "A lady was walking
yesterday in the streets of Westminster when she perceived a
cat in the window of a deserted house. The famished ani-
mal "

"I shall be out of it anyway," Mr. Thornbury interrupted
peevishly.

"Cats are often forgotten," Miss Allan remarked.

"Remember, William, the Prime Minister has reserved his
answer," said Mrs. Thombury.

"At the age of eighty, Mr. Joshua Harris of Eeles Park,
Brondesbury, has had a son," said Hirst.

". . . The famished animal, which had been noticed by-
workmen for some days, was rescued, but — ^by Jove f it bit thfe
man's hand to pieces !"

"Wild with hunger, I suppose," commented Mis-s Allan.

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•Tfou're all neglecting the chief advantage of being abroad,"
said Mr. Hughling Elliot, who had joined the group. "You
might read your news in French, which is equivalent to read-
ing no news at all/*

Mr. Elliot had a profound knowledge of Coptic, which he
concealed as far as possible, and quoted French phrases so
exquisitely that it was hard to believe that he could also speak
the ordinary tongue. He had an immense respect for the
French.

"Coming ?'* he asked the two young men. ''We ought to
start before it's really hot."

"I beg of you not to walk in the heat, Hugh," his wife
pleaded, giving him an angular parcel enclosing half a chicken
and some raisins.

"Hcwet will be our barometer," said Mr. Elliot. "He will
melt before I shall."

Indeed, if so much as a drop had melted off his spare ribs,
the bones would have lain bare. The ladies were left alone
now, surrounding The Times which lay upon the floor. Miss
Allsm looked at her father's watch.

"Ten minutes to eleven," she observed.

"Work?" asked Mrs. Thombury.

"Work," replied Miss Allan.

•*What a fine creature she is !" murmured Mrs. Thombury,
as the square figure in its manly coat withdrew.

"And I'm siu-e she has a hard life," sighed Mrs. Elliot.

"Oh, it is a, hard life," said Mrs. Thombury. "Unmarried
women — eaming their livings — it's the hardest life of all."

"Yet she seems pretty cheerful," said Mrs. Elliot.

"It must be very interesting," said Mrs. Thombury. "I envy
her her knowledge."

"But that isn't what women want," said Mrs. Elliot.

"I'm afraid it's all a great many can hope to have," sighed
Mrs. Thombury. "I believe that there are more of us than
ever now. Sir Harley Lethbridge was telling me only the
other day how difiScult it is to find boys for the navy — ^partly
because of their teeth, it is tme. And I have heard young
women talk quite openly of "

"Dreadful, dreadful!" exclaimed Mrs. Elliot "The crown.

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as one may call it, of a woman's life. I, who know what it is
to be childless " she sighed and ceased.

"But we must not be hard," said Mrs. Thornbury. "The
conditions are so much changed since I was a young woman/*

"Surely maternity does not change," said Mrs. Elliot.

"In some ways we can learn a great deal from the young,"
said Mrs. Thornbury. "I learn so much from my own daugh-
ters."

"I believe that Hughling really doesn't mind," said Mrs.
Elliot. "But then he has his work."

"Women without children can do so much for the children
of others," observed Mrs. Thornbury gently.

"I sketch a great deal," said Mrs. Elliot, "but that isn't really
an occupation. It's so disconcerting to find girls just begin-
ning doing better than one docs oneself ! And nature's diffi-
cult — ^very difficult !"

"Are there not institutions — clubs — ^that you could help?**
asked Mrs. Thornbury.

"They are so exhausting," said Mrs. Elliot. "I look strong,
because of my colour; but I'm not; the youngest of eleven
never is."

"If the mother is careful before," said Mrs. Thornbury ju-
dicially, "there is no reason why the size of the family should
make any difference. And there is no training like the train-
ing that brothers and sisters give each other. I am sure of
that. I have seen it with my own children. My eldest boy
Ralph, for instance "

But Mrs. Elliot was inattentive to the elder lady's experi-
ence, and her eyes wandered about the hall.

"My mother had two miscarriages, I know," she said sud-
denly. "The first because she met one of those great dancing
bears — ^they shouldn't be allowed; the other — ^it was a horrid
story— our cook had a child and there was a dinner party.
So I put my dyspepsia down to that."

"And a miscarriage is so much worse than a confinement,"
Mrs. Thornbury murmured absent-mindedly, adjusting her
spectacles and picking up The Times. Mrs. Elliot rose and
fluttered away.

When she had heard what one of the million voices speaking

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in the paper had to say, and noticed that a cousin of hers had
married a clergyman at Mineheadi — ignoring the drunken
women, the golden animals of Crete, the movements of bat-
talions, the dinners, the reforms, the fires, the indignant, the
learned and benevolent, Mrs. Thombury went upstairs to write
a letter for the mail.

The paper lay directly beneath the clock; the two together I
seeming to represent stability in a changing world. Mr. Per-
rott passed through; Mr. Venning poised for a second on the
edge of a table. Mrs. Paley was wheeled past. Susan fol-
lowed. Mr. Venning strolled after her. Portuguese military
families, their clothes suggesting late rising in untidy bed-
rooms, trailed across, attended by confidential nurses car-
rying noisy children. As midday drew on, and the sun beat
straight upon the roof, an eddy of great flies droned in a
circle; iced drinks were served under the palms; the long
blinds were pulled down with a shriek, turning all the light
yellow. The clock now had a silent hall to tick in, and an
audience of four or five somnolent merchants. By degrees
white figures with shady hats came in at the door, admitting
a wedge of the hot summer day, and shutting it out again.
After resting in the dimness for a minute, they went upstairs.
Simultaneously, the clock wheezed one, and the gong sounded,
beginning softly, working itself into a frenzy, and ceasing.
There was a pause. Then all those who had gone upstairs
came down ; cripples came, planting both feet on the same step
lest they should slip ; prim little girls came, holding the nurse's
finger ; fat old men came still buttoning waistcoats. The gong
had been sounded in the garden, and by degrees recumbent
figures rose and strolled in to eat, since the time had come for
them to feed again. There were pools and bars of shade in
the garden even at midday, where two or three visitors could
lie working or talking at their ease.

Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a si-
lent meal, when people observed their neighbours and took
stock of any new faces there might be, hazarding guesses as
to who they were and what they did. Mrs. Paley, although
well over seventy and crippled in the legs, enjoyed her food

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and the peculiarities of her fellow-beings. She was seated at
a small table with Susan.

"I shouldn't like to say what she is !" she chuckled, survey-
ing a tall woman dressed conspicuously in white, with paint
in the hollows of her cheeks, who was always late, and al-
ways attended by a shabby female follower, at which remark
Susan blushed, and wondered why her aunt said such things.

Lunch went on methodically, until each of the seven courses
was left in fragments and the fruit was merely a toy, to be
peeled and sliced as a child destroys a daisy, petal by petal.
The food served as an extinguisher upon any faint flame of
the human spirit that might survive the midday heat, but Susan
sat in her room afterwards, turning over and over the delight-
ful fact that Mr. Vennig had come to her in the garden, and
had sat there quite half an hour while she read aloud to her
aunt. Men and women sought different comers where they
could lie unobserved, and from two to four it might be said
without exaggeration that the hotel was inhabited by bodies
without souls. Disastrous would have been the result if a
fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of
human nature, but by a merciful dispensation, tragedies come
in the himgry hours. Towards four o'clock the human spirit
again began to lick the body, as a flame licks a black promon-
tory of coal. Mrs. Paley felt it unseemly to open her toothless
jaw so widely, though there was no one near, and Mrs. Elliot
surveyed her round flushed face anxiously in the looking-glass.

Half an hour later, havmg removed the traces of sleep, they
met each other in the hall, and Mrs. Paley observed that she
was going to have her tea. •

"You like your tea too, don't you?" she said, and invited
Mrs. Elliot, whose husband was still out, to join her at a
special table which she had placed for her imder a tree.

"A little silver goes a long way in this country/' she
chuckled.

She sent Susan back to fetch another cup.

"They have such excellent biscuits here," she said, contem-
plating a plateful. "Not sweet biscuits, which I don't like —
dry biscuits. . . . Have you been sketching?"

"Oh, I've done two or three little daubs," said Mrs. Elliot,

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speaking rather louder than usual. "But it's so difficult after
Oxfordshire, where there are so many trees. The light's so
strong here. Some people admire it, I know, but I find it very
fatiguing."

"I really don't need cooking, Susan," said Mrs. Paley, when
her niece returned. "I must trouble you to move me."

Everything had to be moved. Finally the old lady was
placed so that the light wavered over her, as though she were f
a fish in a net. Susan poured out tea, and was just remarking
that they were having hot weather in Wiltshire too, when Mr.
Venning asked whether he might join them.

"It's so nice to find a yotmg man who doesn't despise tea,"
said Mrs. Paley, regaining her good humour. "One of my
nephews the other day asked for a glass of sherry — ^at five
o'clock ! I told him he could get it at the public-house round
the corner, but not in my drawing-room."

"I'd rather go without lunch than tea," said Mr. Venning.
"That's not strictly true. I want both."

Mr. Venning was a dark young man, about thirty-two years
of age, very slapdash and confident in his manner, although at
this moment obviously a little excited. His friend Mr. Perrott
was a barrister, and as Mr. Perrott refused to go anywhere
without Mr. Venning it was necessary, when Mr. Perrott came
to Santa Marina about a Company, for Mr. Venning to come
too. He was a barrister also, but he loathed a profession
which kept him indoors over books, and directly his widowed
mother died he was going, so he confided to Susan, to take up
flying seriously, and become partner in a large business for
making aeroplanes. The talk rambled on. It dealt, of course,
with the beauties and singularities of the place, the streets,
the people, and the quantities of unowned yellow dogs.

"Don't you think it dreadfully cruel the way they treat dogs
in this country?" asked Mrs. Paley.

"I'd have 'em all shot," said Mr. Venning.

"Oh, but the darling puppies," said Susan.

"Jolly little chaps," said Mr. Venning. "Look here, you've
got nothing to eat." A great wedge of cake was handed
Susan on the point of a trembling knife. Her hand trembled
too as she took it.

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"I have such a dear dog at home," said Mrs. Elliot.

"My parrot can't bear dogs," said Mrs. Paley, with the air
of one making a confidence. "I always suspect that he (or
she) was teased by a dog when I was abroad."

"You didn't get far this morning, Miss Warrington," said
Mr. Venning.

"It was hot," she answered. Their conversation became
private, owing to Mrs. Paley's deafness and the long sad his-
tory which Mrs. Elliot had embarked upon of a wire-haired
terrier, white with just one black spot, belonging to an uncle
of hers, which had committed suicide. "Animals do commit
suicide," she sighed, as if she asserted a painful fact.

"Couldn't we explore the town this evening?" Mr. Venning
suggested.

'*My aunt " Susan began.

"You deserve a holiday," he said. "You're always doing
things for other people."

"But that's my life," she said, under cover of refilling the
teapot.

"That's no one's life," he returned, "no young person's.
You'll come?"

"I should like to come," she murmured.

At this moment Mrs. Elliot looked up and exclaimed, "Ob,
Hugh! He's bringing some one," she added.

"He would like some tea," said Mrs. Paley. "Susan, run
and get some cups — ^there are the two young men."

"We're thirsting for tea," said Mr. Elliot. "You know Mr.
Ambrose, Hilda? We met on the hill."

"He dragged me in," said Ridley, "or I should have been
ashamed. I'm dusty and dirty and disagreeable." He pointed
to his boots which were white with dust, while a dejected
flower drooping in his buttonhole, like an exhausted animal
over a gate, added to the effect of length and untidiness. He
was introduced to the others. Mr. Hewet and Mr. Hirst
brought chairs, and tea began again, Susan pouring cascades
of water from pot to pot, always cheerfully, and with the
competence of long use.

"My wife's brother," Ridley explained to Hilda, whom he
failed to remember, "has a house here, which he has lent us.

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I was sitting on a rock thinking of nothing at all when Elliot
started up like a fairy in a pantomime/*

"Our chicken got into the salt," Hewet said dolefully to
Susan. "Nor is it true that bananas include moisture as well
as sustenance/'

Hirst was already drinking.

"We've been cursing you," said Ridley in answer to Mrs.
Elliot's kind enquiries about his wife. "You tourists cat up
all the eggs, Helen tells me. That's an eyesore too" — ^he nod-
ded his head at the hotel. "Disgusting luxury, I call it We
live with pigs in the drawing-room."

"The food is not at all what it ought to be, considering the
price," said Mrs. Paley seriously. "But unless one goes to a
hotel where is one to go to?"

"Stay at home," said Ridley. "I often wish I had f Every
one ought to stay at home. But, of course, they won't."

Mrs. Paley conceived a certain g^dge against Ridley, who
seemed to be criticising her habits after an acquaintance of
five minutes.

"I believe in foreign travel myself," she stated, "if one
knows one's native land, which I think I can honestly say I
do. I should not allow any one to travel tmtil they had vis-
ited Kent and Dorsetshire — ^Kent for the hops, and Dorset-
shire for its old stone cottages. There is liothing to compare
with them here."

"Yes — I always think that some people like the flat and
other people like the downs," said Mrs. Elliot rather vaguely.

Hirst, who had been eating and drinking without inter-
ruption, now lit a cigarette, and observed, "Oh, but we're
all agreed by this time that nature's a mistake. She's either
very ugly, appallingly uncomfortable, or absolutely terrifying.
I don't know which alarms me most — a cow or a tree. I once
met a cow in a field by night. The creature looked at me. I
assure you it turned my hair grey. It's a disgrace that the
animals should be allowed to go at large."

"And what did the cow think of him?' Venning mumbled
to Susan, who immediately decided in her own mind that Mr.
Hirst was a dreadful young man, and that although he had

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such an air of being clever he probably wasn't as clever as
Arthur, in the ways that really matter.

"Wasn't it Wilde who discovered the fact that nature
makes no allowance for hip-bones?" enquired Hughling El-
liot. He knew by this time exactly what scholarships and
distinctions Hirst enjoyed, and had formed a very high opin-
ion of his capacities.

But Hirst merely drew his lips together very tightly and
made no reply.

Ridley conjectured that it was now permissible for him to
take his leave. Politeness required him to thank Mrs. Elliot
for his tea, and to add, with a wave of his hand, "You must
come up and see us."

The wave included both Hirst and Hewet, and Hewet an-
swered, "I should like it immensely."

The party broke up, and Susan, who had never felt so
happy in her life, was just about to start for her walk in the
town with Arthur, when Mrs. Paley beckoned her back. She
could not tmderstand from the book how Double Demon pa-
tience is played; and suggested that if they sat down and
worked it out together it would fill up the time nicely before
dinner.

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CHAPTER X

AMONG the promises which Mrs. Ambrose had made her
niece should she stay was a room cut off from the rest
of the house, large, private — a room in which she could play,
read, think, defy the world, a fortress as well as a sanctuary.
Rooms, she knew, became more like worlds than rooms at the
age of twenty-four. Her judgment was correct, and when
she shut the door Rachel entered an enchanted place, where /
the poets sang and things fell into their right proportions.'
Some days after the vision of the hotel by night she was
sitting alone, sunk in an arm-chair, reading a brightly-cov-
ered red volume lettered on the back Works of Henrik Ibsen.
Music was open on the piano, and books of music rose in two
jagged pillars on the floor; but for the moment music was
deserted.

Far from looking bored or absent-minded, her eyes were
concentrated almost sternly upon the page, and from her
breadiing, which was slow but repressed, it could be seen
that her whole body was constrained by the working of her
mind. At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew
a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks
the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

"What I want to know,*' she said aloud, "is this : What is
the truth? What's the truth of it all?" She was speaking
partly as herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had
just read. The landscape outside, because she had seen
nothing but print for the space of two hours, now appeared
amazin^y solid and clear, but although there were men on
the hill washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid,
for the moment she herself was the most vivid thing in it —
an heroic statue in the middle of the foreground, dominating
the view. Ibsen's plays always left her in that condition. She
acted them for days at a time, greatly to Helen's amusement ;

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and then it would be Meredith's turn and she became Diana
of the Crossways. But Helen was aware that it was not all
acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the
human being.

During the three months she had been here she had made
up considerably, as Helen meant she should, for time spent in
interminable walks round sheltered gardens, and the house-
hold gossip of her aunts. But Mrs. Ambrose would have
been the first to disclaim any influence, or indeed any belief
that to influence was within her power. She saw her less shy,
and less serious, which was all to the good, and the violent leaps
and the interminable mazes which had led to that result were
usually not even guessed at by her. Talk was the medicine she
trusted to, talk about ever)rthing, talk that was free, unguard-
ed, and as candid as a habit of talking with men made natural
in her own case. Nor did she encourage those habits of un-
selfishness and amiability founded upon insincerity which are
put at so high a value in mixed households of men and
women. She desired that Rachel should think, and for this
reason offered books and discouraged too entire a dependence
upon Bach and Beethoven and Wagner. But when Mrs. Am-
brose would have suggested Defoe, Maupassant, or some spa-
cious chronicle of family life, Rachel chose modern books,
books in shiny yellow covers, books with a great deal of gild-
ing on the back, which were tokens in her aunts' eyes of
harsh wrangling and disputes about facts which had no such
importance as the modems claimed for them. But she did
not interfere. Rachel read what she chose, reading with the
curious literalness of one to whom written sentences are un-
familiar, and handling words as though they were made of
wood, separately of great importance, and possessed of
shapes like tables or chairs. In this way she came to con-
clusions, which had to be remodelled according to the adven-
tures of the day, and were indeed recast as liberally as any
one could desire, leaving always a small grain of belief be-
hind them.

The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her
mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a
clock. The sounds in the garden outside joined with the

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clock, and the small noises of midday, which one can ascribe
to no definite cause, in a regular rhythm. It was all very
real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two
she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the
arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some con-
sciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by
the unspeakable queemcss of the fact that she should be sit-
ting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the
world. Who were the people moving in the house — ^moving
things from one place to another? And life, what was that?
It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing,
as in time she would vanish, though the furniture in the
room would remain. Her dissolution became so complete
that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly
still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became
stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that
things should exist at all. . . . She forgot that she had any
fingers to raise. . . . The things that existed were so im-
mense and so desolate. . . . She continued to be conscious
of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time,
the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.

"Come in," she said mechanically, for a string in her brain
seemed to be pulled by a persistent knocking at the door.
With great slowness the door opened and a tall human being
came towards her, holding out her arm and saying:

"What am I to say to this?"

The utter absurdity of a woman coming into a room with
a piece of paper in her hand amazed Rachel.

*T don't know what to answer, or who Terence Hewet is,"
Helen continued, in the toneless voice of a ghost. She put
a paper before Rachel on which were written the incredible
words :

Dear Mrs. Ambrose — ^I am getting up a picnic for next Fri-
day, when we propose to start at eleven-thirty if the weather
is fine, and to make the ascent of Monte Rosa. It will take
some time, but the view should be magnificent. It would give
me great pleasure if you and Miss Vinrace would consent to
be of the party. — ^Yours sincerely, Terence Hewet.

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Rachel read the words aloud to make herself believe in
them. For the same reason she put her hand on Helen's
shoulder.

"Books — books — books," said Helen, in her absent-minded
way. "More new books — I wonder what you find in
them. • . ."

For the second time Rachel read the letter, but to herself.
This time, instead of seeming vague as ghosts, each word
was astonishingly prominent; they came out as the tops of
mountains come through a mist. Friday — eleven-thirty — Miss
Vinrace. The blood began to run in her veins; she felt her
eyes brighten.

**We must go," she said, rather surprising Helen by her
decision. "We must certainly go" — such was the relief of
finding that things still happened, and indeed they appeared
the brighter for the mist surrounding them.

"Monte Rosa — ^that's the mountain over there, isn't it?"
said Helen; "but Hewet — who's he? One of the young men
Ridley met, I suppose. Shall I say yes, then? It may be
dreadfully dull."

She took the letter back and went, for the messenger was
waiting for her answer.

The party which had been suggested a few nights ago in
Mr. Hirst's bedroom had taken shape and was the source
of great satisfaction to Mr. Hewet, who had seldom used his
practical abilities, and was pleased to find them equal to the
strain. His invitations had been universally accepted, which
was the more encouraging as they had been issued against
Hirst's advice to people who were very dull, not at all suited
to each other, and sure not to come.

"Undoubtedly," he said, as he twirled and tmtwirled a note
signed Helen Ambrose, "the gifts needed to make a great
commander have been absurdly overrated. About half the
intellectual effort which is needed to review a book of modem
poetry has enabled me. to get together seven or eight people,
of opposite sexes, at the same spot at the same hour on the
same day. What else is generalship. Hirst? What more did
Wellington do on the field of Waterloo? It's like cotmting the
number of pebbles of a path, tedious but not difficult."

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He was sitting in his bedroom, one leg over the arm of the
chair, and Hirst was writing a letter opposite. Hirst was
quick to point out that all the diflSculties remained.

"For instance, here are two women you've never seen.
Suppose one of them suffers from mountain-sickness, as my
sister does, and the other '*

"Oh, the women are for you,*' Hewet interrupted. "I asked
tiiem solely for your benefit. What you want, Hirst, you
know, is the society of young women of your own age. You
don't know how to get on with women, which is a great de-
fect, considering that half the world consists of women."

Hirst groaned that he was quite aware of that.

But Hewet's complacency was a little chilled as he walked
with Hirst to the place where a general meeting had been ap-
pointed. He wondered why on earth he had asked these peo-
ple, and what one really expected to get from bunching human
beings together in a crowd.

"Cows," he reflected, "draw together in a field; ships in a
calm; and we're just the same when we've nothing else to
do. But why do we do it? — is it to prevent ourselves from
seeing to the bottom of things" (he stopped by a stream and
began stirring it with his walking-stick and clouding the water
with mud), "making cities and mountains and whole uni-
verses out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do
we, on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty,
knowing nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from
world to world? — which is, on the whole, the view / incline
to."

He jumped over the stream ; Hirst went round and joined
him, remarking that he had long ceased to look for the rea-
son of any human action.

Half a mile further, they came to a group of plane trees
and the salmon-pink farmhouse standing by the stream which
had been chosen as meeting-place. It was a shady spot, ly-
ing conveniently just where the hill sprung out from the flat.
Between the thin stems of the plane trees the young men could
see little knots of donkeys pasturing, and a tall woman rub-
bing the nose of one of them, while another woman was
kneeling by the stream lapping water out of her palms.

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As they entered the shady place, Helen looked up and then
held out her hand.

"I must introduce myself/' she said. "I am Mrs. Ambrose."

Having shaken hands, she said, "That's my niece."

Rachel approached awkwardly. She held out her hand,
but withdrew it. "It's all wet," she said.

Scarcely had they spoken, when the first carriage drew up.

The donkeys were quickly jerked into attention, and the
second carriage arrived. By degrees the grove filled with
people — ^the Elliots, the Thomburys, Mr. Venning and Susan,
Miss Allan, Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Mr. Perrott. Mr. Hirst
acted the part of hoarse energetic sheep-dog. By means of
a few words of caustic Latin he had the animals marshalled,
and by inclining a sharp shoulder he lifted the ladies. "What
Hewet fails to understand," he remarked, "is that we must
break the back of the ascent before midday." He was assist-
ing a young lady, by name Evel)m Murgatroyd, as he spoke.
She rose light as a bubble to her seat. With a feather droop-
ing from a broad-brimmed hat, in white from top to toe, she
looked like a gallant lady of the time of Qiarles the First
leading royalist troops into action.

"Ride with me," she conunanded; and, as soon as Hirst had
swung himself across a mule, the two started, leading the
cavalcade.

"You're not to call me Miss Murgatroyd. I hate it," she
said. "My name's Evelyn. What's yours?"

"St. John," he said.

"I like that," said Evelyn. "And whafs your friend's
name?"

"His initials being R. S. T., we call him Monk," said Hirst.

"Oh, you're all too clever," she said. "Which way? Pick
me a branch. Let's canter."

She gave her donkey a sharp cut with a switch and started
forward. The full and romantic career of Evel)m Murga-
troyd is best hit off by her own words, "Call me Evelyn and
I'll call you St. John." She said that on very slight provo-
cation — ^her surname was enough — ^but although a great many
young men had answered her already with considerable
spirit she went on saying it and making choice of none. But

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her donkey stumbled to a jog-trot, and she had to ride in ad-
vance alone, for the path when it began to ascend one of the
spines of the hill became narrow and scattered with stones.
The calvacade wound on like a jointed caterpillar, tufted
with the white parasols of the ladies, and the panama hats of
the gentlemen. At one point where the ground rose sharply,
Evelyn M. jumped oflF, threw her reins to the native boy, and
adjured St. John Hirst to dismount too. Their example was
followed by those who felt the need of stretching.

'T don't see any need to get off," said Miss Allan to Mrs.
Elliot just behind her, "considering the difficulty I had in
getting on."

"These little donkeys stand anjrthing, n'esUce pasf* Mrs.
Elliot addressed the guide, who obligingly bowed his head.

"Flowers," said Helen, stooping to pick the lovely little
bright flowers which grew separately here and there. "You
pinch their leaves and then they smell," she said, laying one
on Miss Allan's knee.

"Haven't we met before ?" asked Miss Allan, looking at her.

'T was taking it for granted," Helen laughed, for in the
confusion of meeting they had not been introduced.

"How sensible!" chirped Mrs. Elliot. "That's just what
one would always like — only unfortunately it's not possible."

"Not possible?" said Helen. "Everything's possible. Who
knows what mayn't happen before nightfall?" she continued,
mocking the poor lady's timidity, who depended so implicitly
upon one thing following another that the mere glimpse of a
world where dinner could be disregarded, or the table moved
one inch from its accustomed place, filled her with fears for
her own stability.

Higher and higher they went, becoming separated from
the world. The world, when they turned to look back, flat-
tened itself out, and was marked with squares of thin green
and grey.

"Towns are very small," Rachel remarked, obscuring the
whole of Santa Marina and its suburbs with one hand. The
sea filled in all the angles of the coast smoothly, breaking in a
white frill, and here and there ships were set firmly in the
blue. The sea was stained with purple and green blots, and

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there was a glittering line upon the rim where it met the sky.
The air was very clear and silent save for the sharp noise of
grasshoppers and the hum of bees, which sounded loud in
the ear as they shot past and vanished. The party halted and
sat for a time in a quarry on the hillside.

"Amazingly clear," exclaimed St. John, identifying one cleft
in the land after another.

Evelyn M. sat beside him, propping her chin on her hand.
She surveyed the view with a certain look of triumph.

'T)'you think Garibaldi was ever up here?" she asked Mr.
Hirst. Oh, if she had been his bride ! If, instead of a picnic
party, this was a party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like
the rest, had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming
her gun at the white turrets beneath them, screening her eyes
to pierce through the smoke! So thinking, her foot stirred
restlessly, and she exclaimed:

"I don't call this life, do you?"

''What do you call life?" said St. John.

"Fighting — revolution," she said, still gazing at the doomed
city. "You only care for books, I know."

"You're quite wrong," said St. John.

"Explain," she urged, for there were no guns to be aimed
at bodies, and she turned to another kind of warfare.

"What do I care for? People," he said.

"Well, I am surprised!" she exclaimed. "You look so
awfully serious. Do let's be friends and tell each other what
we're like. I hate being cautious, don't you?"

But St. John was decidedly cautious, as she could see by
the sudden constriction of his lips, and had no intention of
revealing his soul to a young lady.

"The ass is eating my hat," he remarked, and stretched out
for it instead of answering her. Evel)^ blushed very slightly
and then turned with some impetuosity upon Mr. Perrott, and
when they mounted again it was Mr. Perrott who lifted her to
her seat.

"When one has laid the eggs one eats the omelette," said
Hughling Elliot, exquisitely in French, a hint to the rest of
them that it was time to ride on again.

The midday sun which Hirst had foretold was beginning

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to beat down hotly. The higher they got the more of the
sky appeared, until the mountain was only a small tent of
earth against an enormous blue background. The English fell
silent; the natives who walked beside the donkeys broke into
queer wavering songs and tossed jokes from one to the other.
The way grew very steep, and each rider kept his eyes fixed
on the hobbling curved form of the rider and donkey directly
in front of him. Rather more strain was being put upon their
bodies than is quite legitimate in a party of pleasure, and
Hewet overheard one or two slightly grumbling remarks.

"Expeditions in such heat are perhaps a little unwise,"
Mrs. Elliot murmured to Miss Allan.

But Miss Allan returned, "I always like to get to the top*' ;
and it was true, although she was a big woman, stiff in the
joints, and unused to donkey-riding, but as her holidays were
few she made the most of tfiem.

The vivacious white figure rode well in front; she had
somehow possessed herself of a leafy branch and wore it
rotmd her hat like a garland. They went on for a few min-
utes in silence.

"The view will be wonderful,'* Hewet assured them, turn-
ing round in his saddle and smiling encouragement. Rachel
caught his eye and smiled too. They struggled on for some
time longer, nothing being heard but the clatter of hooves
striving on the loose stones. Then they saw that Evelyn was
oflF her ass, and that Mr. Perrott was standing in the attitude
of a statesman in Parliament Square, stretching an arm of
stone towards the view. A little to the left of them was a
low ruined wall, the stump of an Elizabethan watch-tower.

"I couldn't have stood it much longer," Mrs. Elliot con-
fided to Mrs. Thombury, but the excitement of being at the
top in another moment and seeing the view prevented any
one from answering her. One after another they came out
on the flat space on the top and stood overcome with wonder.
Before them they beheld an immense space — ^grey sands run-
ning into forest, and forest merging in mountains, and moun-
tains washed by air, — ^the infinite distances of South America.
A river ran across the plain, as flat as the land, and appearing
quite as stationary. The effect of so much space was at first

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rather chilling. They felt themselves very small, and for
some time no one said anything. Then Evelyn exclaimed,
^'Splendid!" She took hold of the hand that was next her;
It chanced to be Miss Allan's hand.

"North — South — East — West" said Miss Allan, jerking
her head slightly towards the points of the compass.

Hewet, who had gone a little in front, looked up at his
guests as if to justify himself for having brought them. He
observed how strangely the people standing in a row with
their figures bent slightly forward and their clothes plastered
by the wind to the shape of their bodies resembled naked
statues. On their pedestal of earth they looked unfamiliar
and noble, but in another moment they had broken their
rank, and he had to see to the laying out of food. Hirst
came to his help, and they handed packets of chicken and
bread from one to another.

As St. John gave Helen her packet she looked him full in
the face and said:

"Do you remember — ^two women?"

He looked at her sharply.

"I do," he answered.

"So you're the two women!" Hewet exclaimed, looking
from Helen to Rachel.

"Your lights tempted us," said Helen. "We watched you
playing cards, but we never knew that we were being
watched."

"It was like a thing in a play," Rachel added.

"And Hirst couldn't describe you," said Hewet.

It was certainly odd to have seen Helen and to find nothing
to say about her.

Hughling Elliot put up his eyeglass and grasped the situa-
tion.

"I don't know anything more dreadful," he said, pulling
at the joint of a chicken's leg, "than being seen when one
isn't conscious of it. One feels sure one has been caught
doing something ridiculous — looking at one's tongue in a
hansom, for instance."

Now the others ceased to look at the view, and drawing
together sat down in a circle round the baskets.

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"And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a
fascination of their own," said Mrs. Thombury. "One's
features look so different when one can only see a bit of
them."

"There will soon be very few hansom cabs left," said Mrs.
Elliot. "And four-wheeled cabs — I assure you even at Ox-
ford it's almost impossible to get a four-wheeled cab."

"I wonder what happens to the horses," said Susan.

"Veal pie," said Arthur.

"It's high time that horses should become extinct anyhow,"
said Hirst. "They're distressingly ugly, besides being
vicious."

But Susan, who had been brought up to understand that the
horse is the noblest of God's creatures, could not agree, and
Venning thought Hirst an unspeakable ass, but was too polite
not to continue the conversation.

"When they see us falling out of aeroplanes they get some
of their own back, I expect," he remarked.

"You fly?" said old Mr. Thombury, putting on his spec-
tacles to look at him.

"I hope to, some day," said Arthur.

Here flying was discussed at length, and Mrs. Thombury
delivered an opinion which was almost a speech to the effect
that it would be quite necessary in time of war, and in Eng-
land we were terribly behindhand. "If I were a young fel-
low," she concluded, "I should certainly qualify." It was
odd to look at the little elderly lady, in her grey coat and
skirt, with a sandwich in her hand, her eyes lighting up with
zeal as she imagined herself a young man in an aeroplane. For
some reason, however, the talk did not run easily after this,
and all they said was about drink and salt and the view.
Suddenly Miss Allan, who was seated with her back to the
mined wall, put down her sandwich, picked something off her
neck, and remarked, "I'm covered with little creatures." It
was tme, and the discovery was very welcome. The ants
were pouring down a glacier of loose earth heaped between
the stones of the min — large brown ants with polished bodies.
She held out one on the back of her hand for Helen to look at.

"Suppose they sting?" said Helen. ^

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"They will not sting, but they may infest the victuals,"
said Miss Allan, and measures were taken at once to divert
the ants from their course. At Hewet's suggestion it was
decided to adopt the methods of modem warfare against
an invading army. The table-cloth represented the invaded
country, and round it they built barricades of baskets, set up
the wine bottles in a rampart, made fortifications of bread
and dug fosses of salt. When an ant got through it was
exposed to a fire of bread-crumbs, until Susan pronounced
that that was cruel, and rewarded those brave spirits with*
spoil in the shape of tongue. Playing this game they lost their
stiffness, and even became unusually daring, for Mr. Perrott,
who was very shy, said, "Permit me," and removed an ant
from Evelyn's neck.

"It would be no laughing matter really," said Mrs. Elliot
confidentially to Mrs. Thombury, "if an ant did get betlveen
the vest and the sl^in."

The noise grew suddenly more clamorous, for it was dis-
covered that a long line of ants had found their way on to
the table-cloth by a back entrance, and if success could be
gauged by noise, Hewet had every reason to think his party
a success. Nevertheless he became, for no reason at all, pro-
foundly depressed.

"They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble," he thought,
surveying his guests from a little distance, where he was
gathering together the plates. He glanced at them all, stoop-
ing and swaying and gesticulating round the table-cloth.
Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable even
in their contentment and desire to be kind, how mediocre they
all were, and capable of what insipid cruelty to one another!
There was Mrs. Thombury, sweet but trivial in her maternal
egoism; Mrs. Elliot, perpetually complaining of her lot; her
husband a mere pea in a pod; and Susan — ^she had no self,
and counted neither one way nor the other; Venning was as
honest and as brutal as a schoolboy; poor old Thombury
merely trod his round like a horse in a mill ; and the less one
examined into Evelyn's character the better, he suspected.
Yet these were the people with money, and to them rather
than to others was given the management of the world. Put

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among them some one more vital, who cared for life or for
beauty, and what an agony, what a waste would they inflict
on him if he tried to share with them and not to scourge !

"There's Hirst/' he concluded, coming to the figure of his
friend; with his usual little frown of concentration upon his
forehead he was peeling the skin off a banana. "And he's
as ugly as sin." For the ugliness of St. John Hirst, and the
limitations that went with it, he made the rest in some way
.responsible. It was their fault that he had to live alone.
Then he came to Helen, attracted to her by the sound of
her laugh. She was laughing at Miss Allan. "You wear
combinations in this heat?" she said in a voice which was
meant to be private. He liked the look of her immensely,
not so much her beauty, but her largeness and simplicity,
which made her stand out from the rest like a g^eat stone
woman, and he passed on in a gentler mood. His eye fell
upon Rachel. She was lying back rather behind the others
resting on one elbow ; she might have been thinking precisely
the same thoughts as Hewet himself. Her eyes were fixed
rather sadly but not intently upon the row of people opposite
her. Hewet crawled up to her on his knees, with a piece of
bread in his hand.

"What are you looking at?" he asked.

She was a little startled, but answered directly, "Human
beings."

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CHAPTER XI

ONE after another they rose and stretched themselves, and
in a few minutes divided more or less into two separate
parties. One of these parties was dominated by Hughling
Elliot and Mrs. Thombury, who, having both read the same
books and considered the same questions, were now anxious
to name the places beneath them and to hang upon them
stores of information about navies and armies, political
parties, natives and mineral products — all of which combined,
they said, to prove that South America was the country of
the future.

Evelyn M. listened with her bright blue eyes fixed upon
the oracles.

"How it makes one long to be a man !" she exclaimed.

Mr. Perrott answered, surveying the plain, that a country
with a future was a very fine thing.

"If I were you,*' said Evelyn, turning to him and drawing
her glove vehemently through her fingers, "Fd raise a troop
and conquer some great territory and make it splendid. You'd
want women for that. I'd love to start life from the very-
beginning as it ought to be — nothing squalid — but great halls
and gardens and splendid men and women. But you — ^you
only like Law Courts!"

"And would you really be content without pretty frocks
and sweets and all the things young ladies like?" asked Mr.
Perrott, concealing a certain amount of pain beneath his
ironical manner.

"I'm not a young lady," Evelyn flashed ; she bit her under-
lip. "Just because I like splendid things you laugh at me.
Why are there no men like Garibaldi now ?" she demanded.

"Look here," said Mr. Perrott, "you don't give me a
chance. You think we ought to begin things fresh. Good.
But I don't see precisely — conquer a territory? They're all
conquered already, aren't they?"

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"It's not any territory in particular," Evel3m epcplained.
"It's the idea, don't you see? We lead such tame lives. And
I feel sure you've got splendid things in you."

Hewet saw the scars and hollows in Mr. Perrott's saga-
cious face relax pathetically. He could imagine the calcula-
tions which even then went on within his mind, as to whether
he would be justified in asking a woman to marry him, con-
sidering that he made no more than five hundred a year at the
Bar, owned no private means, and had an invalid sister to
support. Mr. Perrott again knew that he was not "quite,"
as Susan stated in her diary; not quite a gentleman she
meant, for he was the son of a grocer in Leeds, had started
life with a basket on his back, and now, though practically
indistinguishable from a born gentleman, showed his origin
to keen eyes in an impeccable neatness of dress, lack of
freedom in manner, extreme cleanliness of person, and a cer-
tain indescribable timidity and precision with his knife and
fork which might be the relic of days when meat was rare,
and the way of handling it by no means gingerly.

The two parties who were strolling about and losing their
unity now came together, and joined each other in a long
stare over the yellow and green patches of the heated land-
scape below. The hot air danced across it, making it impos-
sible to see the roofs of a village on the plain distinctly.
Even on the top of the mountain where a breeze played light-
ly, it was very hot, and the heat, the food, the immense space,
and perhaps some less well-defined cause produced a com-
fortable drowsiness and a sense of happy relaxation in them.
They did not say much, but felt no constraint in being silent.

"Suppose we go and see what's to be seen over there?" said
Arthur to Susan, and the pair walked off together, their de-
parture certainly sending some thrill of emotion through the
rest.

"An odd lot, aren't they?" said Arthur. "I thought we
should never get 'em all to the top. But I'm glad we came,
by Jove ! I wouldn't have missed this for something."

"I don't like Mr. Hirst," said Susan inconsequently. "I
suppose he's very clever, but why should clever people be so—

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I expect he's awfully nice, really," she added, instinctively
qualifying what might have seemed an unkind remark.

"Hirst ? Oh, he's one of these learned chaps," said Arthur
indifferently. "He don't look as if he enjoyed it. You
should hear him talking to Elliot. It's as much as I can do to
follow 'em at all. ... I was never good at my books."

With these sentences and the pauses that came betweai
them they reached a little hillock, on the top of which grew
several slim trees.

"D'you mind if we sit down here?" said Arthur, looking
about him. "It's jolly in the shade — ^and the view — " They
sat down, and looked straight ahead of them in silence for
some time.

"But I do envy those clever chaps sometimes," Arthur re-
marked. "I don't suppose they ever . . ." He did not finish
his sentence.

"I can't see why you should envy them," said Susan, with
great sincerity.

"Odd things happen to one," said Arthur. "One goes along
smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it's all
very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all
about it, and suddenly one doesn't know where one is a bit,
and everything seems different from what it used to seem.
Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I
seemed to see everything as if — " he paused and plucked a
piece of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps
of earth which were sticking to the roots — ^**As if it had a
kind of meaning. You've made the difference to me," he
jerked out, "I don't see why I shouldn't tell you. I've felt
it ever since I knew you. . . . It's because I love you."

Even while they had been saying commonplace things
Susan had been conscious of the excitement of intimacy,
which seemed not only to lay bare something in her, but in
the trees and the sky, and the progress of his speech which
seemed inevitable was positively painful to her, for no human
being had ever come so close to her before.

She was struck motionless as his speech went on, and her
heart gave g^eat separate leaps at the last words. She sat
with her fingers curled round a stone, looking straight in

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front of her down the mountain over the plain. So then, it
had actually happened to her, a proposal of marriage.

Arthur looked round at her; his face was oddly twisted.
She was drawing her breath with such difficulty that she
could hardly answer.

"You might have known." He seized her in his arms;
again and again and again they clasped each other, murmuring
inarticulately.

"Well," sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, "that* s
the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me." He
looked as if he were trying to put things seen in a dream
beside real things.

There was a long silence.

"It's the most perfect thing in the world," Susan stated,
very gently and with great conviction. It was no longer
merely a proposal of marriage, but of marriage with Arthur,
with whom she was in love.

In the silfence that followed, holding his hand tightly in
hers, she prayed to God that she might make him a good wife.

"And what will Mr. Perrott say?" she asked at the end
of it.

"Dear old fellow," said Arthur who, now that the first
shock was over, was relaxing into an enormous sense of
pleasure and contentment. "We must be very nice to him,
Susan."

He told her how hard Perrott's life had been, and how
absurdly devoted he was to Arthur himself. He went on to
tell her about his mother, a widow lady, of strong character.
In return Susan sketched the portraits of her own family —
Edith in particular, her youngest sister, whom she loved bet-
ter than any one else, "except you, Arthur. . . . Arthur," she
continued, "what was it that you first liked me for?"

"It was a buckle you wore one night at sea," said Arthur,
afttr due consideration. "I remember noticing — it's an ab-
surd thing to notice! — ^that you didn't take peas, because I
don't either."

From this they went on to compare their more serious
tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about,
and professed herself very fond of the same thing. They

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would live in London, perhaps have a cottage in the country
near Susan's family, for they would find it strange without
her at first. Her mind, stunned to begin with, now flew to
the various changes that her engagement would make — ^how
delightful it would be to join the ranks of the married women
— no longer to hang on to groups of girls much younger
than herself — ^to escape the long solitude of an old maid's
life. Now and then her amazing good fortune overcame her,
and she turned to Arthur with an exclamation of love.

They lay in each other's arms and had no notion that they
were observed. Yet two figures suddenly appeared among the
trees above them.

"Here's shade," began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly
stopped dead. They saw a man and woman lying on the
ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as
the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat up-
right and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan War-
rington, lay back upon the ground, with her e5^es shut and
an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not alto-
gether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression
whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When
Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a
ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet
felt uncomfortably shy.

"I don't like that," said Rachel after a moment.

"I can remember not liking it either," said Hewet. 'T can
remember — " but he changed his mind and continued in an
ordinary tone of voice, "Well, we may take it for granted that
they're engaged. D'you think he'll ever fly, or will she put
a stop to that?"

But Rachel was still agitated ; she could not get away from
the sight they had just seen. Instead of answering Hewet
she persisted :

''Love's an odd thing, isn't it, making one's heart beat."

"It's so enormously important, you see," Hewet replied.
"Their lives are now changed for ever."

"And it makes one sorry for them too," Rachel continued,
as though she were tracing the course of her feelings. "I

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don't know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears.
That's silly, isn't it?"

"Just because they're in love," said Hewet. "Yes," he
added after a moment's consideration, "there's something
horribly pathetic about it, I agree."

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove
of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to
the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of
the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity
of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained
with them. As a day upon which any emotion has been re-
pressed is different from other days, so this day was now
different, merely because they had seen other people at a
crisis of their lives.

"A great encampment of tents they might be," said Hewet,
looking in front of him at the mountains. "Isn't it like a
water-colour too— you know the way water-colours dry in
ridges all across the paper — I've been wondering what they
looked like."

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching
things, and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh
of a snail. She sat beside him looking at the mountains too.
When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of
the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural
limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinise
this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she
noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where
she was endowed with the supreme power. She bent a blade
of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and
wondered if the insect realised his strange adventure, and
thought how strange it was that she should have bent that
tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.

"You've never told me your name," said Hewet suddenly.
"Miss Somebody Vinrace. ... I like to know people's Chris-
tian names."

"Rachel," she replied.

"Rachel," he repeated. "I have an aunt called Rachel, who
put the life of Father Damien into verse. She is a religious
fanatic — ^the result of the way she was brought up, down in

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Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul. Have you any
aunts?"

"I live with them," said Rachel.

"And I wonder what they're doing now ?** Hewet enquired.

"They are probably buying wool,*' Rachel determined. She
tried to describe them. "They are small, rather pale women,"
she began, "very clean. We live in Richmond. They have
an old dog, too, who will only eat the marrow out of bones.
. . . They are always going to church. They tidy their
drawers a good deal." But here she was overcome by the
difficulty of describing people.

"It's impossible to believe that it's all going on still!" she
exclaimed.

The sun was behind them and two long shadows suddenly
lay upon the ground in front of them, one waving because
it was made by a skirt, and the other stationary, because
thrown by a pair of legs in trousers.

"You look very comfortable!" said Helen's voice above
them.

"Hirst," said Hewet, pointing at the scissor-like shadow;
he then rolled round to look up at them.

"There's room for us all here," he said.

When Hirst had seated himself comfortably, he said :

"Did you congratulate the young couple?"

It appeared that, coming to the same spot a few minutes
after Hewet and Rachel, Helen and Hirst had seen precisely
the same thing.

"No, we didn't congratulate them," said Hewet. "They
seemed very happy."

"Weil," said Hirst, pursing up his lips, "so long as I needn't
marry either of them "

"We were very much moved," said Hewet.

"I thought you would be," said Hirst. "Which was it.
Monk? The thought of the immortal passions, or the
thought of new-bom males to keep the Roman Catholics out ?
I assure you," he said to Helen, "he's capable of being moved
by either."

Rachel was a good deal stung by his banter, which she felt

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to be directed equally against them both, but she could think
of no repartee.

"Nothing moves Hirst," Hewet laughed ; he did not seem to
be stung at all. "Unless it were a transfinite number falling
in love with a finite one — I suppose such things do happen,
even in mathematics."

"On the contrary," said Hirst with a touch of annoyance,
"I consider myself a person of very strong passions." It was
clear from the way he spoke that he meant it seriously; he
spoke of course for the benefit of the ladies.

"By the way. Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause, "I have
a terrible confession to make. Your book — ^the poems of
Wordsworth, which if you remember I took off your table
just as we were starting, and certainly put in my pocket
here ^"

"Is lost," Hirst finished for him.

"I consider that there is still a chance," Hewet urged, slap-
ping himself to right and left, "that I never did take it after
aU."

"No," said Hirst. "It is here." He pointed to his breast.

"Thank God," Hewet exclaimed. "I need no longer feel
as though I'd murdered a child!"

"I should think you were always losing things," Helen re-
marked, looking at him meditatively.

"I don't lose things," said Hewet. "I mislay them. That
was the reason why Hirst refused to share a cabin with me
on the voyage out."

"You came out together?" Helen enquired.

"I propose that each member of this party now gives a
short biographical sketch of himself or herself," said Hirst,
sitting upright. "Miss Vinrace, you come first; begin."

Rachel stated that she was twenty-four years of age, the
daughter of a ship-owner, that she had never been properly
educated; played the piano, had no brothers or sisters, and
lived at Richmond with aunts, her mother being dead.

"Next," said Hirst, having taken in these facts ; he pointed
at Hewet.

"I am the son of an English gentleman. I am twenty-
seven," Hewet began. "My father was a fox-hunting squire.

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He died when I was ten in the hunting field. I can remember
his body coming home, on a shutter I suppose, just as I was
going down to tea, and noticing that there was jam for tea,
and wondering whether I should be allowed **

"Yes ; but keep to the facts," Hirst put in.

"I was educated at Winchester and Cambridge, which I
had to leave after a time. I have done a good many things
since "

"Profession?'

"None— at least *'

"Tastes?"

"Literary. I'm writing a novel.*'

"Brothers and sisters ?"

"Three sisters, no brother, and a mother."

"Is that all we're to hear about you?" said Helen. She
stated that she was very old — forty last October, and her
father had been a solicitor in the city who had gone bank-
rupt, for which reason she had never had much education —
they lived in one place after another — ^but an elder brother
used to lend her books.

"If I were to tell you everything " she stopped and

smiled. "It would take too long," she concluded. "I married
when I was thirty, and I have two children. My husband is
a scholar. And now — it's your turn," she nodded at Hirst.

"You've left out a great deal," he reproved her. "My name
is St. John Alaric Hirst," he began in a jaunty tone of voice.
"I'm twenty-four years old. I'm the son of the Reverend
Sidney Hirst, vicar of Great Wappyng in Norfolk. Oh, I
got scholarships everywhere — Westminster — King's. I'm
now a fellow of King's. Don't it sound dreary? Parents
both alive (alas). Two brothers and one sister. I'm a very
distinguished young man," he added.

"One of the three, or is it five, most distinguished men in
England," Hewet remarked.

"Quite correct," said Hirst.

"That's all very interesting," said Helen after a pause.
"But of course we've left out the only questions that matter.
For instance, are we Christians?"

"I am not," "I am not," both the young men replied.

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"I am," Rachel stated.

"You believe in a personal God?" Hirst demanded, turning
round and fixing her with his eyeglasses.

"I believe — I believe," Rachel stammered, "I believe there
are things we don't know about, and the world might change
in a minute and anything appear."

At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said.
"You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you
are. — ^And there are lots of other questions," she continued,
"though perhaps we can't ask them yet." Although they had
talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that
they really knew nothing about each other.

"The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really
interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them."

Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very
few things can be said even by people who know each other
well, insisted on knowing what he meant.

"Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is
that the kind of question you mean?"

Again Helen laughed at her, benignantly strewing her with
handfuls of the long tasselled grass, for she was so brave
and so foolish.

"Oh, Rachel," she cried. "It's like having a puppy in the
house having you with one — a puppy that brings one's under-
clothes down into the hall."

But again the sunny earth in front of them was crossed by
fantastic wavering figures, the shadows of men and women.

"There they are!" exclaimed Mrs. Elliot. There was a
touch of peevishness in her voice. "And we've had sucn a
hunt to find you. Do you know what the time is ?"

Mrs. Elliot and Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury now confronted
them; Mrs. Elliot was holding out her watch, and playfully
tapping it upon the face. Hewet was recalled to the fact that
this was a party for which he was responsible, and he imme-
diately led them back to the watch-tower, where they were
to have tea before starting home again. A bright crimson
scarf fluttered from the top of the wall, which Mr. Perrott
and Evelyn were tying to a stone as the others came up. The
heat had changed just so far that instead of sitting in the

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shadow they sat in the sun, which was still hot enough to
paint their faces red and yellow, and to colour great sections
of the earth beneath them.

"There's nothing half so nice as tea!" said Mrs. Thorn-
bury, taking her cup.

"Nothing," said Helen. "Can't you remember as a child
chopping up hay — " she spoke much more quickly than usual,
and kept her eye fixed upon Mrs. Thombury, "and pretending
it was tea, and getting scolded by the nurses — ^why I can't
imagine, except that nurses are such brutes, won't allow pep-
per instead of salt though there's no earthly harm in it.
Weren't your nurses just the same ?"

During this speech Susan came into the group, and sat
down by Helen's side. A few minutes later Mr. Venning
strolled up from the opposite direction. He was a little
flushed, and in the mood to answer hilariously whatever was
said to him.

"What have you been doing to that old chap's grave?" he
asked, pointing to the red flag which floated from the top
of the stones.

"We have tried to make him forget his misfortune in hav-
ing died three hundred years ago," said Mr. Perrott.

"It would be awful — ^to be dead!" ejaculated Eveljm M.

"To be dead?" said Hewet. "I don't think it would be
awful. It's quite easy to imagine. When you go to bed to-
night fold your hands so — ^breathe slower and slower — ^" He
lay back with his hands clasped upon his breast, and his eyes
shut, "Now," he murmured in an even, monotonous voice, "I
shall never, never, never move again." His body, lying flat
among them, did for a moment suggest death.

"This is a horrible exhibition, Mr. Hewet!" cried Mrs.
Thornbury.

"More cake for us!" said Arthur.

"I assure you there's nothing horrible about it," said Hewet,
sitting up and laying hands upon the cake.

"It's so natural," he repeated. "People with children
should make them do that exercise every night. . . . Not that
I look forward to being dead."

"And when you allude to a grave," said Mr. Thombury,

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who spoke almost for the first time, "have you any authority
for calling that ruin a grave? I am quite with you in refus-
ing to accept the common interpretation which declares it to
be the remains of an Elizabethan watch-tower — any more
than I believe that the circular mounds or barrows which we
find on the top of our English downs were camps. The an-
tiquaries call everything a camp. I am always asking them.
Well then, where do you think our ancestors kept their cat-
tle? Half the camps in England are merely the ancient
pound or barton as we call it in my part of the world. The
argument that no one would keep his cattle in such exposed
and inaccessible spots has no weight at all, if you reflect that
in those days a man's cattle were his capital, his stock-in-
trade, his daughter's dowries. Without cattle he was a serf,
another man's man. ..." His eyes slowly lost their inten-
sity, and he muttered a few concluding words under his breath,
looking curiously old and forlorn.

Hughling Elliot, who might have been expected to engage
the old gentleman in argument, was absent at the moment.
He now came up holding out a large square of cotton upon
which a fine design was printed in pleasant bright colours
that made his hand look pale.

"A bargain," he announced, laying it down on the cloth.
"IVe just bought it from the big man with the ear-rings.
Fine, isn't it? It wouldn't suit every one, of course, but it's
just the thing — isn't it, Hilda? — for Mrs. Raymond Parry."

"Mrs. Raymond Parry!" cried Helen and Mrs. Thombury
at the same moment.

They looked at each other as though a mist hitherto ob-
scuring their faces had been blown away.

"Ah — ^you have been to those wonderful parties too?" Mrs.
Elliot asked with interest.

Mrs. Parry's drawing-room, though thousands of miles
away, behind a vast curve of water on a tiny piece of earth,
came before their eyes. They who had had no solidity or an-
chorage before seemed to be attached to it somehow, and at
once grown more substantial. Perhaps they had been in the
drawing-room at the same moment; perhaps they had passed
each other on the stairs; at any rate they knew some of the

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same people. They looked one another up and down with
new interest. But they could do no more than look at each
other, for there was no time to enjoy the fruits of the dis-
covery. The donkeys were advancing, and it was advisable
to begin the descent immediately, for the night fell so quickly
that it would be dark before they were home again.

Accordingly, remounting in order, they filed oflf down the
hillside. Scraps of talk came floating back from one to an-
other. There were jokes to begin with, and laughter; some
walked part of the way, and picked flowers, and sent stones
bounding before them.

"Who writes the best Latin verse in your college. Hirst?"
Mr. Elliot called back incongruously, and Mr. Hirst returned
that he had no idea.

The dusk fell as suddenly as the natives had warned them,
the hollows of the mountain on either side filling up with
darkness and the path becoming so dim that it was surprising
to hear the donkeys' hooves still striking on hard rock. Si-
lence fell upon one, and then upon another, until they were
all silent, their minds spilling out into the deep blue air. The
way seemed shorter in the dark than in the day; and soon
the lights of the town were seen on the flat far beneath
them.

Suddenly some one cried, "Ah!"

In a moment the slow yellow drop rose again from the plain
below; it rose, paused, opened like a flower, and fell in a
shower of drops.

"Fireworks," they cried.

Another went up more quickly ; and then another ; they could
almost hear it twist and roar.

"Some Saint's day, I suppose," said a voice.

The rush and embrace of the rockets as they soared up
into the air seemed like the fiery way in which lovers suddenly
rose and united, leaving the crowd gazing up ^t them with
strained white faces. But Susan and Arthur, riding down the
hill, never said a word to each other, and kept accurately
apart.

TheA the fireworks became erratic, and soon they ceased
altogether, and the rest of the journey was made almost in

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darkness, the mountain being a great shadow behind them,
and bushes and trees little shadows which threw darkness
across the road. Among the plane-trees they separated, bun-
dling into carriages and driving off, without saying good-
night, or saying it only in a half-muffled way.

It was so late that there was no time for normal conversa-
tion between their arrival at the hotel and their retirement
to bed. But Hirst wandered into Hewet's room, with a collar
in his hand.

"Well, Hewet," he remarked, on the crest of a gigantic
yawn, "that was a great success, I consider." He yawned.
"But take care you're not landed with that young woman.
... I don't really like young women. . . ."

Hewet was too much drugged by hours in the open air to
make any reply. In fact every one of the party was sound
asleep within ten minutes or so of each other, with the excep-
tion of Susan Warrington. She lay for a considerable time
looking blankly at the wall opposite, her hands clasped above
her heart, and her light burning by her side. All articulate
thought had long ago deserted her; her heart seemed to have
grown to the size of a sun, and to illuminate her entire body,
shedding like the sun a steady tide of warmth.

"I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy," she repeated "I
love every one. I'm happy."

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CHAPTER XII

WHEN Susan's engagement had been approved at home,
and made public to any one who took an interest in it
at the hotel — and by this time the society at the hotel was
divided so as to point to invisible chalk-marks such as Mr.
Hirst had described, the news was felt to justify some cele-
bration — an expedition? That had been done already. A
dance then. The advantage of a dance was that it abolished
one of those long evenings which were apt to become tedious
and lead to absurdly early hours in spite of bridge.

Two or three people standing under the erect body of the
stuffed leopard in the hall very soon had the matter decided.
Evelyn slid a pace or two this way and that, and pronounced
that the floor was excellent. Signor Rodriguez informed them
of an old Spaniard who fiddled at weddings — ^fiddled so as
to make a tortoise waltz; and his daughter, although en-
dowed with eyes as black as coal-scuttles, had the same
power over the piano. If there were any so sick or so surly
as to prefer sedentary occupations on the night in question
to spinning and watching others spin, the drawing-room and
billiard-room were theirs. Hewet made it his business to
conciliate the outsiders as much as possible. To Hirst's theory
of the invisible chalk-marks he would pay no attention what-
ever. He was treated to a snub or two, but, in reward, found
obscure lonely gentlemen delighted to have this opportimity of
talking to their kind, and the lady of doubtful character
showed every symptom of confiding her case to him in the
near future. Indeed it was made quite obvious to him that
the two or three hours between dinner and bed contained an
amount of unhappiness, which was really pitiable, since so
many people had not succeeded in making friends.

It was settled that the dance was to be on Friday, one
week after the engagement, and at dinner Hewet declared
himself satisfied.

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"They're all coming!" he told Hirst. "Pepper!" he called,
seeing William Pepper slip past in the wake of the soup with
a pamphlet beneath his arm, "We're counting on you to open
the ball."

"You will certainly put sleep out of the question," Pepper
returned.

"You are to take the floor with Miss Allan," Hewet con-
tinued, consulting a sheet of pencilled notes.

Pepper stopped and began a discourse upon round dances,
country dances, morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which
are entirely superior to the bastard waltz and spurious polka
which have ousted them most unjustly in contemporary pop-
ularity — when the waiters gently pushed him on to his table
in the comer.

The dining-room at this moment had a certain fantastic re-
semblance to a farmyard scattered with grain on which bright
pigeons kept descending. Almost all the ladies wore dresses
which they had not yet displayed, and their hair rose in
waves and scrolls so as to appear like carved wood in Grothic
churches rather than hair. The dinner was shorter and less
formal than usual, even the waiters seeming to be affected by
the general excitement. Ten minutes before the clock struck
nine the committee made a tour through the ballroom. The
hall, when emptied of its furniture, brilliantly lit, adorned
with flowers whose scent tinged the air, presented a wonder-
ful appearance of ethereal gaiety.

"Its like a starlit sky on an absolutely cloudless night,"
Hewet murmured, looking about him, at the airy empty room.

"A heavenly floor, anyhow," Evelyn added, taking a run
and sliding two or three feet along it.

"What about those curtains?" asked Hirst. The crimson
curtains were drawn across the long windows. "It's a perfect
night outside."

"Yes, but curtains inspire confidence," Miss Allan decided.
"When the ball is in full swing it will be time to draw them.
We might even open the windows a little. ... If we do it
now elderly people will imagine there are draughts."

Her wisdom had come to be recognised, and held in respect.
Meanwhile as they stood talking, the musicians were unwrap-

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ping their instruments, and the violin was repeating again
and again a note struck upon the piano. Everjrthing was ready
to begin.

After a few minutes' pause, the father, the daughter, and
the son-in-law who played the horn flourished with one ac-
cord. Like the rats who followed the piper, heads instantly
appeared in the doorway. There was another flourish; and
then the trio dashed spontaneously into the triumphant swing
of the waltz. It was as though the room were instantly flowed
with water. After a moment's hesitation first one couple,
then another, leapt into mid-stream, and went rotmd and
round in the eddies. The rh)rthmic swish of the dancers
sounded like a swirling pool. By degrees the room grew per-
ceptibly hotter. The smell of kid gloves mingled with the
strong scent of flowers. The eddies seemed to circle faster
and faster, until the music wrought itself into a crash, ceased,
and the circles were smashed into little separate bits. The
couples struck off in different directions, leaving a thin row
of elderly people stuck fast to the walls, and here and there
a piece of trimming or a handkerchief or a flower lay upon
the floor. There was a pause, and then the music started
again, the eddies whirled, the couples circled round in them,
until there was a crash, and the circles were broken up into
separate bits.

When this had happened about five times. Hirst, who leant
against a window-frame, like some singular gargoyle, per-
ceived that Helen Ambrose and Rachel stood in the doorway.
The crowd was such that they could not move, but he recog-
nised them by a piece of Helen's shoulder and a glimpse of
Rachel's head turning round. He made his way to them;
they greeted him with relief.

"We are suflfering the tortures of the damned," said
Helen.

'This is my idea of hell," said Rachel.

Her eyes were bright and she looked bewildered.

Hewet and Miss Allan, who had been waltzing somewhat
laboriously, paused and greeted the new-comers.

"This is nice," said Hewet. "But where is Mr. Ambrose?"

"Pindar," said Helen. "May a married woman who was

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forty in October dance ? I can't stand still." She seemed to
fade into Hewet, and they both dissolved in the crowd.

"We must follow suit," said Hirst to Rachel, and he took
her resolutely by the elb6w. Rachel, without being expert,
danced well, because of a good ear for rhythm, but Hirst had
no taste for music, and a few dancing lessons at Cambridge
had only put him into possession of the anatomy of a waltz,
without imparting any of its spirit. A single turn proved
to them that their methods were incompatible ; instead of fit-
ting into each other their bones seemed to jut out in angles
making smooth turning an impossibility, and cutting, more-
over, into the circular progress of the other dancers.

"Shall we stop?" said Hirst. Rachel gathered from his
expression that he was annoyed.

They staggered to seats in the comer, from which they had
a view of the room. It was still surging, in waves of blue
and yellow, striped by the black evening-clothes of the gen-
tlemen,

"An amazing spectacle," Hirst remarked. "Do you dance
much in London?" They were both breathing fast, and both
a little excited, though each was determined not to show
any excitement at all.

"Scarcely ever. Do you?"

"My people give a dance every Christmas." .

"This isn't half a bad floor," Rachel said. Hirst did not
attempt to answer her platitude. He sat quite silent, staring
at the dancers. After three minutes the silence became so
intolerable to Rachel that she was goaded to advance another
commonplace about the beauty of the night. Hirst inter-
rupted her ruthlessly.

"Was that all nonsense what you said the other day about
being a Christian and having no education ?" he asked.

"It was practically true," she replied. "But I also*^play
the piano very well," she said, "better, I expect, than any one
in this room. You are the most distinguished man in Eng-
land, aren't you?" she asked shyly.

"One of the three," he corrected.

Helen, whirling past here, tossed a fan into Rachel's lap.

"She is very beautiful," Hirst remarked.

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They were again silent. Rachel was wondering whether he
thought her also nice-looking; St. John was considering the
immense difficulty of talking to girls who had no experience
of life. Rachel had obviously never thought or felt or seen
anything, and she might be intelligent or she might be just like
all the rest. But Hewet's taunt rankled in his mind — ^"yo^
don't know how to get on with women," and he was deter-
mined to profit by this opportunity. Her evening-clothes be-
stowed on her just that degree of unreality and distinction
which made it romantic to speak to her, and stirred a desire
to talk, which irritated him because he did not know how to
begin. He glanced at her, and she seemed to him very remote
and inexplicable, very young and chaste. He drew a sigh,
and began.

"About books now. What have you read? Just Shake-
speare and the Bible ?"

*1 haven't read many classics," Rachel stated. She was
slightly annoyed by his jaunty and rather unnatural manner,
while his masculine acquirements induced her to take a very
modest view of her own powers.

"D'you mean to tell me you've reached the age of twenty-
four without reading Gibbon?" he demanded.

"Yes, I have," she answered.

"Mon Dieu !" he exclaimed, throwing out his hands. "You
must begin to-morrow. I shall send you my copy. What I

want to know is " he looked at her critically. "You see,

the problem is, can one really 'talk to you ? Have you got a
mind, or are you like the rest of your sex? You seem to
me absurdly young compared with men of your age.

Rachel looked at him but said nothing.

"About Gibbon," he continued. "D'you think you'll be able
to appreciate him ? He's the test, of course. It's awfully diffi-
cult to tell about women," he continued, "how much, I mean,
is due to lack of training, and how much is native incapacity.
I don't see myself why you shouldn't understand — only I
suppose you've led an absurd life until now — you've just
walked in a crocodile, I suppose, with your hair down your
back."

The music was again beginning. Hirst's eye wandered

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about the room in search of Mrs. Ambrose. With the best
will in the world he was conscious that they were not getting
on well together.

"I'd like awfully to lend you books," he said, buttoning his
gloves, and rising from his seat. "We shall meet again. I'm
going to leave you now."

He got up and left her.

Rachel looked round. She felt herself surrounded, like a
child at a party, by the faces of strangers all hostile to her,
with hooked noses and sneering, indiflferent eyes. She was by
a window, she pushed it open with a jerk, and stepped out
into the garden. Her eyes swam with tears of rage.

"Damn that man !" she exclaimed, having acquired some of
Helen's words. "Damn his insolence!"

She stood in the middle of the pale square of light which
the window she had opened threw upon the grass. The forms
of great black trees rose massively in front of her. She
stood still, looking at them, shivering slightly with anger and
excitement. She heard the trampling and swinging of the
dancers behind her, and the rhythmic sway of the waltz music.

"There are trees," she said aloud. Would the trees make
up for St. John Hirst? She would be a Persian princess far
from civilisation, riding her horse upon the mountains alone,
and making her women sing to her in the evening, far from
all this, from the strife and men and women — ^A form came
out of the shadow; a little red light burnt high up in its
blackness.

"Miss Vinrace, is it?" said Hewet, peering at her. "You
were dancing with Hirst?"

"He's made me furious !" she cried vehemently. "No one's
any right to be insolent!"

"Insolent?" Hewet repeated, taking his cigar from his
mouth in surprise. "Hirst — insolent?"

"It's insolent to—" said Rachel, and stopped. She did
ilot know exactly why she had been made so angry. With a
great effort she pulled herself together.

"Oh, well," she added, the vision of Helen and her mockery
before her, "I dare say I'm a fool." She made as though she
were going back into the ballroom, but Hewet stopped her.

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"Please explain to me/' he said. "I feel sure Hirst didn't
mean to hurt you."

When Rachel tried to explain, she found it very difficult.
She could not say that she found the vision of herself walk-
ing in a crocodile with her hair down her back peculiarly
unjust and horrible, nor could she explain why Hirst's as-
sumption of the superiority of his nature and experience had
seemed to her not only galling but terrible — as if a gate had
clanged in her face. Pacing up and down the terrace beside
Hewet she said bitterly :

"It's no good; we should live separate; we cannot under-
stand each other; we only bring out what's worst."

Hewet brushed aside her generalisations as to the natures
of the two sexes, for such generalisations bored him and
seemed to him generally untrue. But, knowing Hirst, he
guessed fairly accurately what had happened, and, though
secretly much amused, was determined that Rachel should not
store the incident away in her mind to take its place in the
view she had of life.

"Now you'll hate him," he said, "which is wrong. Poor old
Hirst — ^he can't help his method. And really, Miss Vinrace, he
was doing his best ; he was paying you a compliment — ^he was

trying — he was trying " he could not finish for the laughter

that overcame him.

Rachel veered round suddenly and laughed out too. She
saw that there was something ridiculous about Hirst, and per-
haps about herself.

"It's his way of making friends, I suppose," she laughed.
"Well — I shall do my part. I shall begin — 'Ugly in body, re-
pulsive in mind as you are, Mr. Hirst ' "

"Hear, hear !" cried Hewet. "That's the way to treat him.
You see, Miss Vinrace, you must make allowances for Hirst.
He's lived all his life in front of a looking-glass, in a beautiful
panelled room, hung with Japanese prints and lovely old chairs
and tables, just one splash of colour, you know, in the right
place, — between the windows I think it is, — and there he sits
hour after hour with his toes on the fender, talking about phi-
losophy and God and his liver and his heart and the hearts of
his friends. They're all broken. You can't expect him to

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be at his best in a ballroom. He wants a cosy, smoky, mascu-
line place, where he can stretch his legs«out, and only speak
when he's got something to say. For myself, I find it rather
dreary. But I do respect it. They're all so much in earnest.
They do take the serious things very seriously."

The description of Hirst's way of life interested Rachel so
much that she almost forgot her private grudge against him,
and her respect revived.

"They are really very clever then ?" she asked.

"Of course they are. So far as 'brains go I think it's true
what he said the other day; they're the cleverest people in
England. But — ^you ought to take him in hand," he added.
"There's a great deal more in him than's ever been got at.
He wants some one to laugh at him. . . . The idea of Hirst
telling you that you've had no experiences ! Poor old Hirst !"

They had been pacing up and down the terrace while they
talked, and now one by one the dark windows were uncur-
tained by an invisible hand, and panes of light fell regularly at
equal intervals upon the grass. They stopped to look in at the
drawing-room, and perceived Mr. Pepper writing alone at a
table.

"There's Pepper writing to his aunt," said Hewet. "She
must be a very remarkable old lady, eighty-five, he tells me, and
he takes her for walking tours in the New Forest. . . . Pep-
per !" he cried, rapping on the window. "Go and do your duty.
Miss Allan expects you."

When they came to the windows of the ballroom, the swing
of the dancers and the lilt of the music were irresistible.

"Shall we?" said Hewet, and they clasped hands and swept
off magnificently into the great swirling pool. Although this
was only the second time they had met, the first time they had
seen a man and woman kissing each other, and the second
time Mr. Hewet had found that a young woman angry is very
like a child. So that when they joined hands in the dance they
felt more at their ease than is usual.

It was midnight and the dance was now at its height. Serv-
ants were peeping in at the windows ; the garden was sprinkled
with the white shapes of couples sitting out. Mrs. Thornbury
and Mrs. Elliot sat side by side under a palm tree, holding

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fans, handkerchiefs, and brooches deposited in their laps by
flushed maidens. Occasionally they exchanged comments.

"Miss Warrington does look happy," said Mrs. Elliot ; they
toth smiled ; they both sighed.

"He has a great deal of character," said Mrs. Thombury,
alluding to Arthur.

• "And character is what one wants," said Mrs. Elliot. "Now
that young man is clever enough," she added, nodding at Hirst,
who came past with Miss Allan on his arm.

"He does not look strong," said Mrs. Thombury. "His
<:omplexion is not good. — Shall I tear it off?" she asked, for
Rachel had stopped, conscious of a long strip trailing behind
her.

"I hope you are enjoying yourselves?" Hewet asked the
ladies.

"This is a very familiar position for me!" smiled Mrs.
Thombury. "I have brought out five daughters — and they all
loved dancing! You love it too. Miss Vinrace?" she asked,
looking at Rachel with matemal eyes. "I know I did when I
was your age. How I used to beg my mother to let me stay —
and now I sympathise with the poor mothers — ^but I S3rmpathise
with the daughters too !"

She smiled s)mipathetically, and at the same time looked
rather keenly at Rachel.

"They seem to find a great deal to say to each other," said
Mrs. Elliot, looking significantly at the backs of the couple as
they turned away. "Did you notice at the picnic? He was
the only person who could make her utter."

"Her father is a very interesting man," said Mrs. Thombury.
"He has one of the largest shipping businesses in Hull. He
made a very able reply, you remember, to Mr. Asquith at the
last election. It is so interesting to find that a man of his ex-
perience is a strong Protectionist."

She would have liked to discuss politics, which interested her
more than personalities, but Mrs. Elliot would only talk about
the Empire in a less abstract form.

"I hear there are dreadful accoimts from England about the
rats," she said. "A sister-in-law, who lives at Norwich, tells
me it has been quite unsafe to order poultry. The plague—

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you see. It attacks the rats, and through them other crea-.
tures."

"And the local authorities are not taking proper steps?'*
asked Mrs. Thornbury.

"That she does not say. But she describes the attitude of
the educated people — who should know better — as callous in
the extreme. Of course, my sister-in-law is one of those active
modem women, who always takes things up, you know — the
kind of woman one admires, though one does not feel, at least
I do not feel — but then she has a constitution of iron."

Mrs. Elliot, brought back to the consideration of her own
delicacy, here sighed.

"A very animated face," said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at
Evel)m M. who had stopped near them to pin tight a scarlet
flower at her breast. It would not stay, and, with a spirited
gesture of impatience, she thrust it into her partner's button-
hole. He was a tall melancholy youth, who received the gift as
a knight might receive his lady's token.

"Very trying to the eyes," was Mrs. Elliot's next remark,
after watching the yellow whirl in which so few of the whirlers
had either name or character for her, for a few minutes. Burst-
ing out of the crowd, Helen approached them, and took a va-
cant chair.

"May I sit by you?" she said, smiling and brjeathing fast,
"I suppose I ought to be ashamed of myself," she went on, sit-
ting down, "at my age."

Her beauty, now that she was flushed and animated, was
more expansive than usual, and both the ladies felt the same
desire to touch her.

"I am enjoying myself," she panted. Movement — isn't it
amazing ?"

"I have always heard that nothing comes up to dancing if one
is a good dancer," said Mrs. Thornbury, looking at her with a
smile.

Helen swayed slightly as if she sat on wires.

"I could dance for ever!" she said. "They ought to let
themselves go more !" she exclaimed. "They ought to leap and
swing. Look ! How they mince !"

"Have you seen those wonderful Russian dancers?" began

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Mrs. Elliot. But Helen saw her partner coming and rose as
the moon rises. She was half round the room before they took
their eyes off her, for they could not help admiring her, al-
though they thought it a little odd that a woman of her age
should enjoy dancing.

Directly Helen was left alone for a minute she was joined by
St. John Hirst, who had been watching for an opportunity.

"•Should you mind sitting out with me?" he asked. "I'm
quite incapable of dancing." He piloted Helen to a corner
which was supplied with two arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the
advantage of semi-privacy. They sat down, and for a few
minutes Helen was too much under the influence of dancing to
speak.

"Astonishing !" she exclaimed at last. "What sort of shape
can she think her body is?" This remark was called forth
by a lady who came past them, waddling rather than walking,
and leaning on the arm of a stout man with globular green
eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was necessary, for
she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper part of
her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could
only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round
her ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny
yellow satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with
round shields of blue and green beads made to imitate the hues
of a peacock's breast. On the summit of a frothy castle of
hair a purple plume stood erect, while her short neck was en-
circled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems, and golden
bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat gloved
arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig,
mottled red under a dusting of powder.

St. John could not join in Helen's laughter.

"It makes me sick," he declared. "The whole thing makes
me sick. . . . Consider the minds of those people — their feel-
ings. Don't you agree?"

"I always make a vow never to go to another party of any
description," Helen replied, "and I always break it."

She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the
young man. She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at
the same time slightly excited.

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"However," he said, resuming his jaunty tone, "I suppose
one must just make up one's mind to it."

"To what?''

"There never will be more than five people in the world
worth talking to."

Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen's face died away, and
she looked as quiet and as observant as usual.

"Five people?'* she remarked. "I should say there were
more than five."

"You've been very fortunate, then," said Hirst. "Or per-
haps I've been very unfortunate." He became silent.

"Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on
with ?" he asked abruptly.

"Most clever people are when they're young," Helen replied.

"And of course I am — immensely clever," said Hirst. "I'm
infinitely cleverer than Hewet. It's quite possible," he con-
tinued in his curiously impersonal manner, "that I'm going to
be one of the people who really matter. That's utterly differ-
ent from being clever, though one can't expect one's family to
see it," he added bitterly.

Helen thought herself justified in asking, "Do you find your
family difficult to get on with ?"

"Intolerable. . . . They want me to be a peer and a privy
councillor. I've come out here partly in order to settle the
matter. It's got to be settled. Either I must go to the bar,
or I must stay on in Cambridge. Of course, there are obvious
drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly do seem to me
in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!" he waved his
hand at the crowded ballroom. "Repulsive. I'm conscious
of great powers of affection too. I'm not susceptible, of
course, in the way Hewet is. I'm very fond of a few people.
I think, for example, that there's something to be said for my
mother, though she is in many ways so deplorable. ... At
Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become the most im-
portant man in the place, but there are other reasons why I
dread Cambridge " he ceased.

"Are you finding me a dreadful bore?" he asked. He
changed curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a
conventional young man at a party.

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"Not in the least," said Helen. "I like it very much."

"You can't think," he exclaimed, speaking almost with emo-
tion, "what a difference it makes finding some one to talk to !
Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me.
I'm very fond of Hewet, but he hasn't the remotest idea what
I'm like. You're the only woman I've ever met who seems
to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a
thing."

The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of
Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it ; but she
felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up
and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered,
and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected
that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish
to receive confidences.

"I'm very old," she sighed.

"The odd thing is that I don't find you old at all," he replied.
"I feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover — "
here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face,
'"I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to
a man — about the relations between the sexes, about . . .
and . . ."

In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face
as he spoke the last two words.

She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she ex-
claimed, "I should hope so!"

He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which
were drawn about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.

"Thank God!" he exclaimed. "Now we can behave like
civilised human beings."

Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and
it was possible to speak of matters which are generally only
alluded to between men and women when doctors are present,
or the shadow of death. In five minutes he was telling her
the history of his life. It was long, for it was full of extremely
elaborate incidents, which led on to a discussion of the prin-
ciples on which morality is founded, and thus to several very
interesting matters, which even in this ballroom had to be dis-
cussed in a whisper, lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or

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resplendent merchants should overhear them, and proceed to
demand that they should leave the place. When they had come
to an end, or, to speak more accurately, when Helen intimated
by a slight slackening of her attention that they had sat there
long enough. Hirst rose, exclaiming, "So there's no reasoa
whatever for all this mystery !"

"None, except that we are English people," she answered.
She took his arm and they crossed the ballroom, making their
way with difficulty between the spinning couples, who were now
perceptibly dishevelled, and certainly to a critical eye by no
means lovely in their shapes. The excitement of undertaking a
friendship and the length of their talk had made them hungry,
and they went in search of food to the dining-room, which was
now full of people eating at little separate tables. In the door-
way they met Rachel, going up to dance again with Arthur
Venning. She was flushed and looked very happy, and Helen
was struck by the fact that in this mood she was certainly more
attractive than the generality of young women. She had
never noticed it so clearly before.

"Enjoying yourself?" she asked, as they stopped for a sec-
ond.

"Miss Vinrace," Arthur answered for her, "has just made a
confession ; she'd no idea that dances could be so delightful."

"Yes!" Rachel exclaimed. "I've changed my view of life
completely !"

"You don't say so !" Helen mocked. They passed on.

"That's typical of Rachel," she said. "She changes her view
of life about every other day. D'you know, I believe you're
just the person I want," she said, as they sat down, "to help
me to complete her education? She's been brought up prac-
tically in a nuxmery. Her father's too absurd. I've been do-
ing what I can — ^but I'm too old, and I'm a woman. Why
shouldn't you talk to her — explain things to her — talk to her,
I mean, as you talk to me ?"

"I have made one attempt already this evening," said St.
John. "I rather doubt that it was successful. She seems to
me so very young and inexperienced. I have promised to lend
her Gibbon."

"It's not Gibbon exactly," Helen pondered, "It's the facts

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of life, I think — d'you see what I mean? What really goes on,
what people feel, although they generally try to hide it?
There's nothing to be frightened at. It's so much more beau-
tiful than the pretences — always more interesting — always bet-
ter, I should say, than that kind of thing."

She nodded her head at a table near them, where twa girls
and two young men were chaffing each other very loudly, and
carrying on an arch insinuating dialogue, sprinkled with en-
dearments, about, it seemed, a pair of stockings or a pair of
legs. One of the girls was flirting a fan and pretending to be
shocked, and the sight was very unpleasant, partly because it
was obvious that the girls were secretly hostile to each other.

"In my old age, however," Helen sighed, "I'm coming to
think that it doesn't much matter in the long run what one
does : people always go their own way — ^nothing will ever in-
fluence them." She nodded her head at the supper party.

But St. John did not agree. He said that he thought one
could really make a great deal of difference by one's point of
view, books and so on, and added that few things at the pres-
ent time mattered more than the enlightenment of women. He
sometimes thought that almost everything was due to educa-
tion.

In the ballroom, meanwhile, the dancers were being formed
into squares for the lancers. Arthur and Rachel, Susan and
Hewet, Miss Allan and Hughling Elliot found themselves to-
gether.

Miss Allan looked at her watch.

"Half-past one," she stated. "And I have to despatch Alex-
ander Pope to-morrow."

"Pope!" snorted Mr. Elliot. "Who reads Pope, I should

like to know? And as for reading about him No, no.

Miss Allan ; be persuaded you will benefit the world much more
by dancing than by writing." It was one of Mr. Elliot's affec-
tations that nothing in the world could compare with the de-
lights of dancing — ^nothing in the world was so tedious as liter-
ature. Thus he sought pathetically enough to ingratiate him-
self with the young, and to prove to them beyond a doubt that
though married to a ninny of a wife, and rather pale and bent

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and careworn by his weight of learning, he was as much alive
as the youngest of them all.

"It's a question of bread and butter," said Miss Allan calmly.
"However, they seem to expect me." She took up her position
and pointed a square black toe.

"Mr. Hewet, you bow to me." It was evident at once that
Miss Allan was the only one of them who had a thoroughly
sound knowledge of the figures of the dance.

After the lancers there was a waltz ; after the waltz a polka ;
and then a terrible thing happened ; the music, which had been
sounding regularly with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly.
The lady with the great dark eyes began to swathe her violin
in silk, and the gentleman placed his horn carefully in its case.
They were surrounded by couples imploring them in English,
in French, in Spanish, for one more dance, one only; it was
still early. But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his
watch and shook his head. He turned up the collar of his
coat and produced a red silk muffler, which completely dashed
his festive appearance. Strange as it seemed, the musicians
were pale and heavy-eyed ; they looked bored and prosaic, as if
the summit of their desire was cold meat and beer, succeeded
immediately by bed.

Rachel was one of those who had begged them to con-
tinue. When they refused she began turning over the sheets
of dance music which lay upon the piano. The pieces were
generally bound in coloured covers, with pictures on them of
romantic scenes — gondoliers astride the crescent of the moon,
nuns peering through the bars of a convent window, or young
women with their hair down pointing a gun at the stars. She
remembered that the general effect of the music to which they
had danced so gaily was one of passionate regret for dead love
and the innocent years of youth ; dreadful sorrows had always
separated the dancers from their past happiness.

"No wonder they get sick of playing stuff like this," she
remarked, reading a bar or two ; "they're really hymn tunes,
played very fast, with bits out of Wagner and Beethoven."

''Do you play? Would you play? Anything, so long as we
can dance to it !" From all sides her gift for playing the piano
was insisted upon, and she had to consent. As very soon she

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had played the only pieces of dance music she could remember,
she went on to play an air from a sonata by Mozart.

"But that's not a dance," said some one pausing by the piano.

"It IS," she replied, emphatically nodding her head. "In-
vent the steps." Sure of her melody she marked the rhythm
boldly so as to simplify the way. Helen caught the idea ; seized
Miss Allan by the arm, and whirled round the room, now curt-
seying, now spinning round, now tripping this way and that
like a child skipping through a meadow.

,"This is the dance for people who don't know how to dance !"
she cried. The tune changed to a minuet; St. John hopped
with incredible swiftness first on his left leg, then on his right ;
the tune flowed melodiously; Hewet, swaying his arms and
holding out the tails of his coat, swam down the room in imi-
tation of the voluptuous dreamy dance of an Indian maiden
dancing before her Rajah. The tune marched ; and Miss Al-
lan advanced with skirts extended and bowed profoundly to
the engaged pair. Once their feet fell in with the rhythm
they showed a complete lack of self-consciousness. From
Mozart Rachel passed without stopping to old English hunting
songs, carols, and hymn tunes, for, as she had observed, any
good tune, with a little management, became a tune one could
dance to. By degrees every person in the room was tripping
and turning in pairs or alone. Mr. Pepper executed an in-
genious pointed step derived from figure-skating, for which he
once held some local championship; while Mrs. Thombury
tried to recall an old country dance which she had seen danced
by her father's tenants in Dorsetshire in the old days. As for
Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, they gallopaded round and round the
room with such impetuosity that the other dancers shivered
at their approach. Some people were heard to criticise the
performance as a romp; to others it was the most enjoyable
part of the evening.

"Now for the great round dance!" Hewet shouted. In-
stantly a gigantic circle was formed, the dancers holding hands
and shouting out, "D'you ken John Peel," as they swung faster
and faster and faster, until the strain was too great, and one
link of the chain — Mrs. Thombury — gave way, and the rest
went flying across the room in all directions, to land upon the

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floor or the chairs or in each other's arms as seemed most con-
venient.

Rising from these positions, breathless and unkempt, it
struck them for the first time that the electric lights pricked
the air very vainly, and instinctively a great many eyes turned
to the windows. Yes — ^there was the dawn. While they had
been dancing the night had passed, and it had come. Outside,
the mountains showed very pure and remote; the dew was
sparkling on the grass, and the sky was flushed with blue, save
for the pale yellows and pinks in the East. The dancers came
crowding to the windows, pushed them open, and here and
there ventured a foot upon the grass.

"How silly the poor old lights look!" said Evel)m M. in a
curiously subdued tone of voice. "And ourselves ; it isn't be-
coming." It was true ; the untidy hair, and the green and yel-
low gems, which had seemed so festive half an hour ago, now
looked cheap and slovenly. The complexions of the elder
ladies suffered terribly, and, as if conscious that a cold eye had
been turned upon them, they began to say good-night and to
make their way up to bed.

Rachel, though robbed of her audience, had gone on playing
to herself. From John Peel she passed to Bach, who was at
this time the subject of her intense enthusiasm, and one by one
some of the younger dancers came in from the garden and sat
upon the deserted gilt chairs round the piano, the room being
now so clear that they turned out the lights. As they sat and
listened, their nerves were quieted; the heat and soreness of
their lips, the result of incessant talking and laughing, was
smoothed away. They sat very still as if they saw a building
with spaces and columns succeeding each other rising in the
empty space. Then they began to see themselves and their
lives, and the whole of human life advancing very nobly under
the direction of the music. They felt themselves ennobled,
and when Rachel stopped playing they desired nothing but
sleep.

Susan rose. "I think this has been the happiest night of my
life!" she exclaimed. "I do adore music," she said, as she
thanked Rachel. "It just seems to say all the things one can't
say oneself." She gave a nervous little laugh and looked

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from one to another with great benignity, as though she would
hTce to say something but could not find the words in which to
express it. "Every one's been so kind — so very kind," she
said. Then she too went to bed.

The party having ended in the very abrupt way in which
parties do end, Helen and Rachel stood by the door with their
cloaks on, looking for a carriage.

"I suppose you realise that there are no carriages left ?" said
St. John, who had been out to look. "You must sleep here."

"Oh, no," said Helen; "we shall walk."

"May we come too?" Hewet asked. "We can't go to bed.
Imagine lying among bolsters and looking at one's washstand
on a morning like this — Is that where you live ?"

They had begun to walk down the avenue, and he turned
and pointed at the white and green villa on the hillside, which
seemed to have its eyes shut.

"That's not a light burning, is it ?" Helen asked anxiously.

"It's the sun," said St. John. The upper windows had each
a spot of gold on them.

"I was afraid it was my husband, still reading Greek," she
said. "All this time he's been editing Pindar."

They passed through the town and turned up the steep road,
which was perfectly clear, though still unbordered by shad-
ows. Partly because they were tired, and partly because the
early light subdued them, they scarcely spoke, but breathed in
the delicious fresh air, which seemed to belong to a different
state of life from the air at midday. When they came to the
high yellow wall, where the lane turned off from the road,
Helen was for dismissing the two young men.

"You've come far enough," she said. "Go back to bed."

But they seemed unwilling to move.

"Let's sit down a moment," said Hewet. He spread his coat
on the ground. "Let's sit down and consider." They sat
down and looked out over the bay; it was very still, the sea
was rippling faintly, and lines of green and blue were beginning
to stripe it. There were no sailing boats as yet, but a steamer
was anchored in the bay, looking very ghostly in the mist ; it
gave one unearthly cry, and then all was silent.

Rachel occupied herself in collecting one grey stone after

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w ^ XXOlwi

another and building them into a little cairn; she did it very
quietly and carefully.

"And so you've changed your view of life, Rachel?" said
Helen.

Rachel added another stone and yawned. "I don't remem-
ber/' she said, "I feel like a fish at the bottom of the sea."
She yawned again. None of these people possessed any power
to frighten her out here in the dawn, and she felt perfectly
familiar even with Mr. Hirst.

"My brain, on the contrary," said Hirst, "is in a condition of
abnormal activity." He sat in his favourite position with his
arms binding his legs together and his chin resting on the top
of his knees. "I see through ever)rthing — absolutely every-
thing. Life has no more mysteries for me." He spoke with
conviction, but did not appear to wish for an answer. Near
though they sat, and familiar though they felt, they seemed
mere shadows to each other.

"And all those people down there going to sleep," Hewdt
began dreamily, "thinking such different things, — Miss War-
rington, I suppose, is now on her knees ; the Elliots are a little
startled, it's not often they get out of breath, and they want
to get to sleep as quickly as possible ; then there's the poor lean
young man who danced all night with Evelyn ; he's putting his
flower in water and asking himself, *Is this love?' — and poor
old Perrott, I daresay, can't get to sleep at all, and is reading
his favourite Greek book to console himself — and the others —
no. Hirst," he wound up, "I don't find it simple at all."

"I have a key," said Hirst cryptically. His chin was still
upon his knees and his eyes fixed in front of him.

A silence followed. Then Helen rose and bade them good-
night. "But," she said, "remember that you've got to come
and see us."

They waved good-night and parted, but the two young men
did not go back to the hotel; they went for a walk, during
which they scarcely spoke, and never mentioned the names of
the two women, who were, to a considerable extent, the subject
of their thoughts. They did not wish to share their impres-
sions. They returned to the hotel in time for breakfast.

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CHAPTER XIII

THERE were many rooms in the villa, but one room which
possessed a character of its own because the door was
always shut, and no souhd of music or laughter issued from it.
Every one in the house was vaguely conscious that something
went on behind that door, and without in the least knowing
what it was, were influenced in their own thoughts by the
knowledge that if they passed it the door would be shut, and
if they made a noise Mr. Ambrose inside would be disturbed.
Certain acts therefore possessed merit, and others were bad,
so that life became more harmonious and less disconnected than
it would have been had Mr. Ambrose given up editing Pindar,
and taken to a nomad existence, in and out of every room in the
house. As it was, every one was conscious that by observing
certain rules, such as punctuality and quiet, by cooking well,
and performing other small duties, one ode after another was
satisfactorily restored, and they themselves shared the continu-
ity of the scholar's life. Unfortunately, as age puts one barrier
between human beings, and learning another, and sex a third,
Mr. Ambrose in his study was some thousand miles distant
from the nearest human being, who in this household was in-
evitably a woman. He sat hour after hour among white-
leaved books, alone like an idol in an empty church, still except
for the passage of his hand from one side of the sheet to
another, silent save for an occasional choke, which drove him
to extend his pipe a moment in the air. As he worked his way
further and further into the heart of the poet, his chair became
more and more deeply encircled by books, which lay open on
the floor, and could only be crossed by a careful process of step-
ping, so delicate that his visitors generally stopped and ad-
dressed him from the outskirts.

On the morning after the dance, however, Rachel came into
her uncle's room and hailed him twice, "Uncle Ridley," before
he paid her any attention.

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At length he looked over his spectacles.

"Well?" he asked.

"I want a book," she replied. "Gibbon's History of the
Roman Empire. May I have it ?"

She watched the lines on her uncle's face gradually rearrange
themselves at her question. It had been smooth as a mask be-
fore she spoke.

"Please say that again," said her uncle, either because he had
not heard or because he had not understood.

She repeated the same words and reddened slightly as she
did so.

"Gibbon! What on earth d'you want him for?" he in-
quired.

"Somebody advised me to read it," Rachel stammered.

"But I don't travel about with a miscellaneous collection of
eighteenth-century historians !" her uncle exclaimed. "Gibbon !
Ten big volumes at least."

Rachel said that she was sorry to interrupt, and was turn-
ing to go.

"Stop !" cried her uncle. He put dewn his pipe, placed his
book on one side, and rose and led her slowly round the room,
holding her by the arm. "Plato," he said, laying one finger
on the first of a row of small dark books, "and Jorrocks next
door, which is wrong. Sophocles, Swift. You don't care for
German commentators, I presume. French, then. You read
French? You should read Balzac. Then we come to Words-
worth and Coleridge. Pope, Johnson, Addison, Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats. One thing leads to another. Why is Marlowe
here? Mrs. Chailey, I presume. But what's the use of read-
ing if you don't read Greek ? After all, if you read Greek, you
need never read an)rthing else, pure waste of time — ^pure' waste
of time," thus speaking half to himself, with quick movements
of his hands ; they had come round again to the circle of books
on the floor, and their progress was stopped.

"Well," he demanded; "which shall it be?"

"Balzac," said Rachel, "or have you the Speech on the Amer-
ican Revolution, Uncle Ridley ?"

*'The Speech on the American Revolution?*' he asked. He

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looked at her very keenly again. "Another young man at the
dance?"

"No. That was Mr. Dalloway," she confessed.

"Good Lord !" he flung back his head in recollection of Mr.
Dalloway.

She chose for herself a volume at random, submitted it to
her uncle, who, seeing that it was La Cousine Bette, bade her
throw it away if she found it too horrible, and was about to
leave him when he demanded whether she had enjoyed her
dance ?

He then wanted to know what people did at dances, seeing
that he had only been to one thirty-five years ago, when noth-
ing had seemed to him more meaningless and idiotic. Did they
enjoy turning round and round to the screech of a fiddle ? Did
they talk, and say pretty things, and if so, why didn't they do
it under reasonable conditions? As for himself — he sighed,
and pointed at the signs of industry lying all about him, which,
in spite of his sigh, filled his face with such satisfaction that
his niece thought good to leave. On bestowing a kiss she was
allowed to go, but not until she had bound herself to learn at
any rate the Greek alphabet, and to return her French novel
when done with, upon which something more suitable would be
found for her.

As the rooms in which people live are apt to give off some-
thing of the same shock as their faces when seen for the first
time, Rachel walked very slowly downstairs, lost in wonder
at her uncle, and his books, and his neglect of dances, and his
queer, utterly inexplicable, but apparently satisfactory view of
life, when her eye was caught by a note with her name on it
lying in the hall. The address was written in a small strong
hand unknown to her, and the note, which had no beginning,
ran: —

I send the first volume of Gibbon as I promised. Personally
I find little to be said for the moderns, but I'm going to send
you Wedekind when I've done him. Donne ? Have you read
Webster and all that set? I envy you reading them for the
first time. Completely exhausted after last night. And you?

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The flourish of initials which she took to be St. J. A. H.
wound up the letter. She was very much flattered that Mr.
Hirst should have remembered her, and fulfilled his promise
so quickly.

There was still an hour to luncheon, and with Gibbon in one
hand, and Balzac in the other she strolled out of the gate and
down the little path of beaten mud between the olive trees on
the slope of the hill. It was too hot for climbing hills, but
along the valley there were trees and a grass path running by
the river bed. In this land where the population was centred
in the towns it was possible to lose sight of civilisation in a
very short time, passing only an occasional farmhouse, where
the women were handling red roots in the courtyard; or a
little boy lying on his elbows on the hillside surrounded by a
flock of black strong-smelling goats. Save for a thread of
water at the bottom, the river was merely a deep channel of dry
yellow stones. On the bank grew those trees which Helen had
said it was worth the voyage out merely to see. April had
burst their buds, and they bore large blossoms among their
glossy green leaves with petals of a thick wax-like substance
coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson. But
filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start
generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries
and skies into their embrace, she walked without seeing. The
night was encroaching upon the day. Her ears hummed with
the tunes she had played the night before; she sang, and the
singing made her walk faster and faster. She did not see
distinctly where she was going, the trees and the landscape
appearing only as masses of green and blue, with an occasional
space of differently coloured sky. Faces of people she had
seen last night came before her; she heard their voices; she
stopj)ed singing, and began saying things over again or saying
things differently, or inventing things that might have been
said. The constraint of being among strangers in a long silk
dress made it unusually exciting to stride thus alone. Hewet,
Hirst, Mr. Venning, Miss Allan, the music, the light, the dark
trees in the garden, the dawn, — as she walked they went surg-
ing round in her head, a tumultuous background from which
the present moment, with its opportunity for doing exactiy as

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she liked, sprung more wonderfully vivid even than the night
before.

So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge
of her way, had it not been for the interruption of a tree,
which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her
as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face. It
was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it
might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was the
trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there,
leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly
as if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having
seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a life-
time would preserve that second, the tree once more sank into
the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself in
its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green leaves
which were growing beneath it. She laid them side by side,
flower to flower and stalk to stalk, caressing them for, walking
alone, flowers and even pebbles in the earth had their own life
and disposition, and brought back the feelings of a child to
whom they were companions. Looking up, her eye was caught
by the line of the mountains flying out energetically across the
sky like the lash of a curling whip. She looked at the pale
distant sky, and the high bare places on the mountain-tops lying
exposed to the sun. When she sat down she had dropped
her books on to the earth at her feet, and now she looked down
on them lying there, so square in the grass, a tall stem bend-
ing over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while
the mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun. With a feeling
that to open and read would certainly be a surprising experi-
ence, she turned the historian's page and read that —

His generals, in the early part of his reign, attempted
the reduction of Aethiopia and Arabia Felix. They
marched near a thousand miles to the south of the tropic;
but the heat of the climate soon repelled the invaders
and protected the unwarlike natives of those sequestered
regions. . . . The northern countries of Europe scarcely
deserved the expense and labour of conquest. The forests
and morasses of Germany were filled with a hardy race of

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barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from
freedom.

Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful— Arabia
Felix — ^Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the
others, hardy barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed
to drive roads back to the very beginning of the world, on
either side of which the populations of all times and countries
stood in avenues, and by passing down them all knowledge
would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to the
very first page. Such was her excitement at the possibilities
of knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to read,
and a breeze turning the page, the covers of Gibbon gently
ruffled and closed together. She then rose again and walked on.
Slowly her mind became less confused and sought the origins
of her exaltation, which were twofold and could be limited by
$n eflFort to the persons of Mr. Hirst and Mr. Hewet. Any
clear analysis of them was impossible owing to the haze of
wonder in which they were enveloped. She cotdd not reason
about them as about people whose feelings went by the same
rule as her own did, and her mind dwelt on them with a kind
of physical pleasure such as is caused by the contemplation
of bright things hanging in the sun. From them all life seemed
to radiate ; the very words of books were steeped in radiance.
She then became haunted by a suspicion which she was so re-
luctant to face that she welcomed a trip and stumble over the
grass because thus her attention was dispersed, but in a sec-
ond it had collected itself again. Unconsciously she had been
walking faster and faster, her body trying to outrun her
mind ; but she was now on the summit of a little hillock of earth
which rose above the river and displayed the valley. She was
no longer able to juggle with several ideas, but must deal with
the most persistent, and a kind of melancholy replaced her ex-
citement. She sank down on to the earth, clasping her knees
together, and looking blankly in front of her. For some time
she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and
closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone.

"What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long

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silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself
out into an unknown sea. Hypnotised by the wings of the but-
terfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in
life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew
away, she rose, and with her two books beneath her arm re-
turned home again, much as a soldier prepared for battle.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted
as usual at the hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of elec-
tric lights. The hours between dinner and bedtime were al-
ways difficult enough to kill, and the night after the dance they
were further tarnished by the peevishness of dissipation. Cer-
tainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in
long armchairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups
beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening
was unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the
men unusually fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been
distributed half an hour ago there were no letters for either
of the two young men. As every other person, practically, had
received two or three plump letters from England, which they
were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and prompted
Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed.
Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-
house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws.
He went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to
hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to
parrots, and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-
decayed bodies of sheep. The intermittent sounds — ^now a
cough, now a horrible wheezing or throat-clearing, now a little
patter of conversation — were just, he declared, what you hear
if you stand in the lion-house when the bones are being mauled.
But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet, who, after a care-
less glance round the room, fixed his eyes upon a thicket of
native spears which were so ingeniously arranged as to run
their points at you whichever way you approached them. He
was clearly oblivious of his surroundings; whereupon Hirst,
perceiving that Hewet's mind was a complete blank, fixed his
attention more closely upon his fellow-creatures. He was too
far from them, however, to hear what they were saying, but it

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pleased him to construct little theories about them from their
gestures and appearance.

Mrs. Thornbury had received a great many letters. She was
completely engrossed in them. When she had finished a page
she handed.it to her husband, or gave him the sense of what
she was reading in a series of short quotations linked together
by a sound at the back of her throat. "Evie writes that George
has gone to Glasgow. *He fiiids Mr. Chadbourne so nice to
work with, and we hope to spend Christmas together, but I
should not like to move Betty and Alfred any great distance
(no,.quite right), though it is difficult to imagine cold weather
in this heat. . . . Eleanor an4 Roger drove over in the new
trap. . . . Eleanor certainly looked more like herself than
I've seen her since the winter. She has put Baby on three
bottles now, which I'm sure is wise (I'm sure it is too), and
so gets better nights. . . . My hair still falls out. I find it
on the pillow ! But I am cheered by hearing from Tottie Hall
Green. . . . Muriel is in Torquay enjoying herself greatly at
dances. She is going to show her black pug after all.' ... A
line from Herbert — so busy, poor fellow! Ah! Margaret
says, Toor old Mrs. Fairbank died on the eighth, quite sud-
denly in the conservatory, only a maid in the house, who hadn't
the presence of mind to lift her up, which they think might
have saved her, but the doctor says it might have come at any
moment, and one can only feel thankful that it was in her
house and not in the street (I should think so !). The pigeons
have increased terribly, just as the rabbits did five years
ago. . . .'" While she read her husband kept nodding his
head very slightly, but very steadily in sign of approval.

Near by, Miss Allan was reading her letters too. They were
not altogether pleasant, as could be seen from the slight rigidity
which came over her large fine face as she finished reading
them and replaced them neatly in their envelopes. The lines of
care and responsibility on her face made her resemble an
elderly man rather than a woman. The letters brought her
news of the failure of last year's fruit crop in New Zealand,
which was a serious matter, for Hubert, her only brother, made
his living on a fruit farm, and if it failed again, of course he
would throw up his place, come back to England, and what

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were they to do with him this time? The journey out here,
which meant the loss of a term's work, became an extravagance
and not the just and wonderful holiday due to her after fifteen
years of punctual lecturing and correcting essays upon English
literature. Emily, her sister, who was a teacher also, wrote:
"We ought to be prepared, though I have no doubt Hubert
will be more reasonable this time." And then went on in her
sensible way to say that she was enjoying a very jolly time
in the Lakes. 'They are looking exceedingly pretty just now.
I have seldom seen the trees so forward at this time of year.
We have taken our lunch out several days. Old Alice is as
young as ever, and asks after every one aflFectionately. ' The
days pass very quickly, and term will soon be here. Political
prospects not good, I think privately, but do not like to damp
Ellen's enthusiasm. Lloyd George has taken the Bill up, but
so have many before now, and we are where we are ; but trust
to find myself mistaken. Anyhow, we have our work cut out
fof us. . . . Surely Meredith lacks the human note one likes
in W. W. ?" she concluded, and went on to discuss some ques-
tions of English literature which Miss Allan had raised in her
last letter.

At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and
made semi-private by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and
Susan were reading each other's letters. The big slashing
* manuscripts of hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay
on Arthur's knee, while Susan deciphered tight little legal
hands which rarely filled more than a page, and always con-
veyed the same impression of jocular and breezy goodwill.

"I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur," she said,
looking up.

"Who's your loving Flo?" asked Arthur.

"Flo Graves — ^the girl I told you about, who was engaged to
that dreadful Mr. Vincent," said Susan. "Is Mr. Hutchinson
married ?" she asked.

Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her
friends, or rather with one magnificent plan — which was sim-
ple too — ^they were all to get married — at once — directly she
got back. Marriage, marriage, that was the right thing, the
only thing, the solution required by every one she knew, and a

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great part of her meditations was spent in tracing every in-
stance of discomfort, loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition,
restlessness, eccentricity, taking things up and dropping them
again, public speaking, and philanthropic activity on the part of
men and particularly on the part of women to the fact that
they wanted to marry, were trying to marry, and had not suc-
ceeded in getting married. If, as she was bound to own, these
symptoms sometimes persisted after marriage, she could only
ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature which decreed that
there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who
could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of be-
ing fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely
uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a
voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare
but treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical
of the kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she be-
came engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect,
positively protested when Susan as usual knelt down to lace
her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of Susan's
company where she had been used to exact two or three as her
right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort
than she had been used to, and the change had already pro-
duced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other
people.

It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been
able to lace her own shoes or even to see them, the disappear-
ance of her feet having coincided more or less accurately with
the death of her husband, a man of business, soon after which
event Mrs. Paley began to grow stout. She was a selfish, inde-
pendent old woman, possessed of a considerable income, which
she spent upon the upkeep of a house that needed seven serv-
. ants and a charwoman ii^ Lancaster Gate, and another with a
garden and carriage-horses in Surrey. Susan's engagement
relieved her of the one great anxiety of her life — ^that her son
Oiristopher should "entangle himself" with his cousin. Now
that this familiar source of interest was removed, she felt a
little low and inclined to see more in Susan than she used to.
She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding p#esent,
a cheque for two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly.

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conceivably — it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths'
bill for doing up the drawing-room — ^three hundred pounds
sterling.

She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures,
as she sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cards
by her side. The Patience had somehow got into a muddle,
and she did not like to call for Susan to help her, as Susan
seemed to be busy with Arthur.

"She's every right to expect a handsome present from me,
of course," she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its
hind legs, "and I've no doubt she does! Money goes a long
way with every one. The young are very selfish. If I were to
die, nobody would miss me but Dakyns, and she'll be consoled
by the will ! However, I've got no reason to complain. . . .
I can still enjoy myself. I'm not a burden to any one. ... I
like a great many things a good deal, in spite of my legs."

Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of
the only people she had known who had not seemed to her at all
selfish or fond of money, who had seemed to her somehow
rather finer than the general run; people, she willingly ac-
knowledged, who were finer than she was. There were only
two of them. One was her brother, who had been drowned
before her eyes, the other was a girl, her greatest friend, who
had died in giving birth to her first child. These things had
happened some fifty years ago. ^

"They ought not to have died," she thought. "However,
they did — ^and we selfish old creatures go on." The tears came
to her eyes ; she felt a genuine regret for them, a kind of respect
for tfieir youth and beauty, and a kind of shame for herself ;
but the tears did not fall ; and she opened one of those innu-
merable novels which she used to pronounce good, bad, pretty
middling, or really wonderful. "I can't think how people come
to imagine such things," she would say, taking off her spec-
tacles and looking up with the old faded eyes, that were be-
coming ringed with white.

Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess
with Mr. Pepper. He was being defeated,, naturally, for Mr.
Pep;38r scarcely took his eyes oflF the board, and Mr. Elliot kept
leaning back in his chair and throwing out remarks to a gentle-

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man who had only arrived the night before, a tall handsome
man, with a head resembling the head of an intellectual ram.
After a few remarks of a general nature had passed, they were
discovering that they knew some of the same people, as in-
deed had been obvious from their appearance directly they
saw each other.

"Ah yes, old Truefit," said Mr. Elliot. "He has a son at
Oxford. I've often stayed with them. It's a lovely old Ja-
cobean house. Some exquisite Greuzes — one or two Dutch
pictures which the old boy kept in the cellars. Then there
were stacks upon stacks of prints. Oh, the dirt in that house!
He was a miser, you know. The boy married a daughter of
Lord Pinwells. I know them too. The collecting mania tends
to run in families. This chap collects buckles — men's shoe-
buckles they must be, in use between the years 1580 and 1660;
the dates mayn't be right, but the fact's as I say. Your true
collector always has some unaccountable fad of that kind. On
other points he's as level-headed as a breeder of shorthorns,
which is what he happens to be. Then the Pinwells, as you
probably know, have their share of eccentricity too. Lady
Maud, for instance " he was interrupted here by the neces-
sity of considering his move, — "Lady Maud has a horror of
cats and clergymen, and people with big front teeth. I've
heard her shout across a table, *Keep your mouth shut. Miss
Smith ; they're as yellow as carrots !' across a table, mind you.
To me she's always been civility itself. She dabbles in litera-
ture, likes to collect a few of us in her drawing-room, but men-
tion a clergyman, a bishop even, nay, the Archbishop himself,
and she gobbles like a turkey-cock. I've been told it's a family
feud — something to do with an ancestor in the reign of Charles
the First. Yes," he continued, suffering check after check,
"I always like to know something of the grandmothers of our
fashionable young men. In my opinion they preserve all that
we admire in the eighteenth century, with the advantage, in the
majority of cases, that they are personally clean. Not that one
would insult old Lady Barborough by calling her clean. How
often d'you think, Hilda," he called out to his wife, "her lady-
ship takes a bath?"

"I should hardly like to say, Hugh," Mrs. Elliot tittered,

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"but wearing puce velvet, as she does even on the hottest Au-
gust day, it somehow doesn't show/'

"Pepper, you have me," said Mr. Elliot. "My chess is even
worse than I remember." He accepted his defeat with great
equanimity, because he really wished to talk.

He drew his chair beside Mr. Wilfred Flushing, the new-
comer.

"Are these at all in your line ?" he asked, pointing at a case
in front of them, where highly polished crosses, jewels, and
bits of embroidery, the work of the natives, were displayed to
tempt visitors.

"Shams, all of them," said Mr. Flushing briefly. "This rug,
now, isn't at all bad." He stooped and picked up a piece of
the rug at their feet. "Not old, of coursie, but the design is
quite in the right tradition. Alice, lend me your brooch. See
the diflFerence between the old work and the new."

A lady, who was reading with great concentration, unfas-
tened her brooch and gave it to her husband without looking
at him or acknowledging the tentative bow which Mr. Elliot
was desirous of giving her. If she had listened, she might
have been amused by the reference to old Lady Barborough,
her great-aunt, but, oblivious of her surroundings, she went on
reading.

The clock, which had been wheezing for some minutes like
an old man preparing to cough, now struck nine. The sound
slightly disturbed certain somnolent merchants, government
officials, and men of independent means who were lying back
in their chairs, chatting, smoking, ruminating about their af-
fairs, with their eyes half shut; they raised their lids for an
instant at the sound and then closed them again. They had
the appearance of crocodiles so fully gorged by their last meal
that the future of the world gives them no anxiety whatever.
The only disturbance in the placid bright room was caused by a
large moth which shot from light to light, whizzing over elabo-
rate heads of hair, and causing several young women to raise
their hands nervously and exclaim, "Some one ought to kill it !"

Absorbed in their own thoughts, Hewet and Hirst had not
spoken for a long time.

When the clock struck. Hirst said :

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"Ah, the creatures begin to stir. . . /' He watched them
raise themselves, look about them, and settle down again.
"What I abhor most of all," he concluded, "is the female
breast. Imagine being Venning and having to get into bed
with Susan ! But the really repulsive thing is that they feel
nothing at all — about what I do when I have a hot bath.
They're gross, they're absurd, they're utterly intolerable !"

So saying, and drawing no reply from Hewet, he proceeded
to think about himself, about science, about Cambridge, about
the Bar, about Helen and what she thought of him, until, being
very tired, he was nodding off to sleep.

Suddenly Hewet woke him up.

"How d'you know what you feel, Hirst ?'*

"Are you in love?" asked Hirst. He put in his eyeglass.

"Don't be a fool," said Hewet.

"Well, I'll sit down and think about it," said Hirst. "One
really ought to. If these people would only think about things,
the world would be a far better place for us all to live in. Are
you trying to think?"

That was exactly what Hewet had been doing for the last
half-hour, but he did not find Hirst sympathetic at the mo-
ment.

"I shall go for a walk," he said.

"Remember we weren't in bad last night," said Hirst with a
prodigious )rawn.

Hewet rose and stretched himself.

"I want to go and get a breath of air," he said.

An unusual feeling had been bothering him all the evening
and forbidding him to settle into any one train of thought.
It was precisely as if he had been in the middle of a talk which
interested him profoundly when some one came up and inter-
rupted him. He could not finish the talk, and the longer he
sat there the more he wanted to finish it. As the talk that
had been interrupted was a talk with Rachel, he had to ask
himself why he felt this, and why he wanted to go on talking
to her. Hirst would merely say that he was in love with her.
But he was not in love with her. Did love begin in that way,
with the wish to go on talking? No. It always began in his
case with definite physical sensations, and these were now ab-

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sent; he did not even find her physically attractive. There
was something, of course, unusual about her — she was young,
inexperienced, and inquisitive ; they had been more open with
each other than was usually possible. He always found girls
interesting to talk to, and surely these were good reasons why
he should wish to go on talking to her; and last night, what
with the crowd and the confusion, he had only been able to
begin to talk to her. What was she doing now ? Lying on a
sofa and looking at the ceiling, perhaps. He could imagine
her doing that, and Helen in an armchair, with her hands
on the arm of it, so — ^looking ahead of her, with her great
big eyes — oh no, they'd be talking, of course, about the dance.
But suppose Rachel was going away in a day or two, suppose
this was the end of her visit, and her father had arrived in
one of the steamers anchored in the bay, — it was intolerable
to know so little. Therefore he exclaimed, "How d'you know
what you feel. Hirst ?'* to stop himself from thinking.

But Hirst did not help him, and the other people with their
aimless movements and their imknown lives were disturbing,
so that he longed for the empty darkness. The first thing he
looked for when he stepped out of the hall door was the light
of the Ambrose's villa. When he had definitely decided that a
certain light apart from the others higher up the hill was their
light, he was considerably reassured. There seemed to be at
once a little stability in all this incoherence. Without any
definite plan in his head, he took the turning to the right and
walked through the town and came to the wall by the meeting
of the roads, where he stopped. The booming of the sea was
audible. The dark-blue mass of the mountains rose against
the paler blue of the sky. There was no moon, 1>ttt piyriads of
stars, and lights were anchored up and down in the dark
waves of earth all round him. He had meant to go back, but
the single light of the Ambrose's villa had now become three
separate lights, and he was tempted to go on. He might as
well make sure that Rachel was still there. Walking fast, he
soon stood by the iron gate of their garden, and pushed it open ;
the outline of the house suddenly appeared sharply before his
eyes, and the thin column of the verandah cutting across the
palely lit gravel of the terrace. He hesitated. At the back of

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the house some one was rattling cans. He approached the
front; the light on the terrace showed him that the sitting-
rooms were on that side. He stood as near the light as he
could by the comer of the house, the leaves of a creeper brush-
ing his face. After a moment he could hear a voice. The
voice went on steadily; it was not talking, but from the con-
tinuity of the sound it was a voice reading aloud. He crept a
little closer ; he crumpled the leaves together so as to stop their
rustling about his ears. It might be Rachel's voice. He left
the shadow and stepped into the radius of the light, and then
heard a sentence spoken quite distinctly.

"And there we lived from the year i860 to 1895, the hap-
piest years of my parents' lives, and there in 1862 my brother
Maurice was bom, to the delight of his parents, as he was des-
tined to be the delight of all who knew him."

The voice quickened, and the tone became conclusive, rising
slightly in pitch, as if these words were at the end of the chap-
ter. Hewet drew back again into the shadow. There was a
long silence. He could just hear chairs being moved inside.
He had almost decided to go back, when suddenly two figures
appeared at the window, not six feet from him.

"It was Maurice Fielding, of course, that your mother was
engaged to," said Helen's voice. She spoke reflectively, look-
ing out into the dark garden, and thinking evidently as much
of the look of the night as of what she was saying.

"Mother?" said Rachel. Hewet's heart leapt, and he no-
ticed the fact. Her voice, though low, was full of surprise.

"You didn't know that?" said Helen.

"I never knew there'd been any one else," said Rachel. She
was clearly surprised, but all they said was said low and inex-
pressively, because they were speaking out into the cool dark
night.

"More people were in love with her than with any one I've
ever known," Helen stated. "She had that power — she en-
joyed things. She wasn't beautiful, but — I was thinking of
her last night at the dance. She got on with every kind of per-
son, and then she made it all so amazingly — funny."

It appeared that Helen was going back into the past, choos-

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ing her words deliberately, comparing Theresa with the people
she had known since Theresa died.

**I don't know how she did it," she continued, and ceased,
and there was a long pause, in which a little owl called first
here, then there, as it moved from tree to tree in the garden.

'That's so like Aunt Lucy and Aunt Katie," said Rachel at
last. "They always make out that she was very sad and very
good."

"Then why, for goodness' sake, did they do nothing but
criticize her when she was alive?" said Helen. Very gentle
their voices sounded, as if they fell through the waves of the
sea.

"If I were to die to-morrow . • ." she began.

The broken sentences had an extraordinary beauty and de-
tachment in Hewet's ears, and a kind of mystery too, as though
they were spoken by people in their sleep.

"No, Rachel," Helen's voice continued, "I'm not going to
walk in the garden ; it's damp — it's sure to be damp ; besides, I
see at least a dozen toads."

"Toads? Those are stones, Helen. Come out It's nicer
out. The flowers smell," Rachel replied.

Hewet drew still farther back. His heart was beating very
quickly. Apparently Rachel tried to pull Helen out on to the
terrace, and Helen resisted. There was a certain amount of
scuffling, entreating, resisting, and laughter from both of them.
Then a man's form appeared. Hewet could not hear what
they were all saying. In a minute they had gone in ; he could
hear bolts grating then; there was dead silence, and all the
lights went out.

He turned away, still crumpling and uncrumpHng a handful
of leaves which he had torn from the wall. An exquisite sense
of pleasure and relief possessed him; it was all so solid and
peaceful after the ball at the hotel, whether he was in love with
them or not, and he was not in love with them; no, but it was
good that they should be alive.

. After standing still for a minute or two he turned and be-
gan to walk towards the gate. With the movement of his
body, the excitement, the romance and the richness of life
crowded into his brain. He shouted out a line of poetry, but

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the words escaped him, and he stumbled among lines and frag-
ments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the
beauty of the words. He shut the gate, and ran swinging f rojn
side to side down the hill, shouting any nonsense that came
into his head. "Here am I," he cried rhythmically, as his feet
pounded to the left and to the right, "plunging along, like an
elephant in the jungle, stripping the branches as I go (he
snatched at the twigs of a bush at the roadside), roaring in-
numerable words, lovely words about innumerable things, run-
ning downhill and talking nonsense aloud to myself about roads
and leaves and lights and women coming out into the darkness
— about women — ^about Rachel, about Rachel." He stopped
and drew a deep breath. The night seemed immense and hos-
pitable, and although it was so dark there seemed to be things
moving down there in the harbour and movement out at sea.
He gazed until the darkness numbed him, and then he walked
on quickly, still murmuring to himself. "And I ought to be in
bed, snoring and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreams and
realities, dreams and realities, dreams and realities," he re-
peated all the way up the avenue, scarcely knowing what he
said, until he reached the front door. Here he paused for a
second, and collected himself before he opened the door.

His eyes were dazed, his hands very cold, and his brain ex-
cited and yet half asleep. Inside the door everything was as
he had left it except that the hall was now empty. There were
the chairs turning in towards each other where people had sat
talking, and the empty glasses on little tables, and the news-
papers scattered on the floor. As he shut the door he felt as
if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly shrivelled up.
It was all very bright and very small. He stopped for a min-
ute by the long table to find a paper which he had meant to
read, but he was still too much under the influence of the dark
and the fresh air to consider carefully which paper it was or
where he had seen it.

As he fumbled vaguely among the papers he saw a figure
cross the tail of his eye, coming downstairs. He heard the
swishing sound of skirts, and to his great surprise, Evelyn M.
came up to him, laid her hand on the table as if to prevent him
from taking up a paper, and said :

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"You're just the person I wanted to talk to." Her voice
was a little unpleasant and metallic, her eyes were very bright,
and she kept them fixed upon him.

"To talk to me ?" he repeated. "But I'm half asleep."

"But I think you understand better than most people," she
answered, and sat down on a little chair placed beside a big
leather chair so that Hewet had to sit down beside her.

"Well ?" he said. He yawned openly, and lit a cigarette. He
could not believe that this was really happening to him. "What
is it?"

"Are you really sympathetic, or is it just a pose?" she de-
manded.

"It's for you to say," he replied. "I'm interested, I think."
He still felt numb all over and as if she was much too close to
him.

"Any one can be interested !" she cried impatiently. "Your
friend Mr. Hirst's interested, I daresay. However, I do be-
lieve in you. You look as if you'd got a nice sister, somehow."
She paused, picking at some sequins on her knees, and then,
as if she had made up her mind, she started oflF, "Anyhow, I'm
going to ask your advice. D'you ever get into a state where
you don't know your own mind ? That's the state I'm in now.
You see, last night at the dance Raymond Oliver, — he's the tall
dark boy who looks as if he had Indian blood in him, but he
says he's not really, — well, we were sitting out together, and
he told me all about himself, how unhappy he is at home, and
how he hates being out here. They've put him into some
beastly mining business. He says it's beastly — I should like it,
I know, but that's neither here nor there. And I felt awfully
sorry for him, one couldn't help being sorry for him, and when
he asked me to let him kiss me, I did. I don't see any harm
in that, do you ? And then this morning he said he'd thought
I meant something more, and I wasn't the sort to let any one
kiss me. And we talked and talked. I daresay I was very
silly, but one can't help liking people when one's sorry for them.

I do like him most awfully " She paused. "So I gave him

half a promise, and then, you see, there's Alfred Perrott"

"Oh, Perrott," said Hewet.

"We got to know each other on that picnic the other day/*

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she continued. "He seemed so lonely, especially as Arthur
had gone off with Susan, and one couldn't help guessing what
was in his mind. So we had quite a long talk when you were
looking at the ruins, and he told me all about his life, and his
struggles, and how fearfully hard it had been. D'you know,
he was a boy in a grocer's shop and took parcels to people's
houses in a basket? That interested me awfully, because I
always say it doesn't matter how you're bom if you've got the
right stuff in you. And he told me about his sister who's
paralysed, poor girl, and one can see she's a great trial, though
he's evidently very devoted to her. I must say I do admire
people like that! I don't expect you do because you're so
clever. Well, last night we sat out in the garden together, and
I couldn't help seeing what he wanted to say, and comforting
him a little, and telling him I did care — I really do — only, then,
there's Raymond Oliver. What I want you to tell me is, can
one be in love with two people at once, or can't one?"

She became silent, and sat with her chin on her hands, look-
ing very intent, as if she were facing a real problem which had
to be discussed between them.

"I think it depends what sort of person you are," said
Hewet. He looked at her. She was small and pretty, aged
perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but though dashing and
sharply cut, her features expressed nothing very clearly, ex-
cept a great deal of spirit and good health.

"Who are you, what are you ; you see, I know nothing about
you," he continued.

"Well, I was coming to that," said Evelyn M. She continued
to rest her chin on her hands and to look intently ahead of her.
"I'm the daughter of a mother and no father, if that interests
you," she said. "It's not a very nice thing to be. It's what
often happens in the country. She was a farmer's daughter,
and he was rather a swell — the young man up at the great
house. He never made things straight — ^never married her —
though he allowed us quite a lot of money. His people wouldn't
let him. Poor father! I can't help liking him. Mother
wasn't the sort of woman who could keep him straight, any-
how. He was killed in the war. I believe his men worshipped
him. They say great big troopers broke down and cried over

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his body on the battlefield. I wish I'd known him. Mother
had all the life crushed out of her. The world — *' She
clenched her fist. "Oh, people can be horrid to a woman like
that !" She turned upon Hewet. ^

"Well," she said, "d'you want to know any more about me ?"

"But you ?" he asked. "Who looked after you ?"

"I've looked after myself mostly," she laughed. "I've had
splendid friends. I do like people ! That's the trouble. What
would you do if you liked two people, both of them tremen-
dously, and you couldn't tell which most ?"

"I should go on liking them — I should wait and see. Why
not?"

"But one has to make up one's mind," said Evelyn. "Or
are you one of the people who deesn^t believe in marriage and ^^
all that? Look here — ^this isn't fair, I do all the telling, and
you tell nothing. Perhaps you're the same as your friend" —
she 'looked at him suspiciously; "perhaps yon don't like me?"

"I don't know you," said Hewet.

"I know when I like a person directly I see them ! I knew
I liked you the very first night at dinner. Oh dear," she con-
tinued impatiently, "what a lot of bother would be sa[ved if
only people would say the things they think straight out ! I'm
made like that. I can't help it."

"But don't you find it leads to difficulties ?" Hewet asked.

"That's men's fault," she answered. "They always drag it
in — ^love, I mean."

"And so you've gone on having one proposal after another,"
said Hewet^

"I don't suppose I've had more proposals than most women,"
said Evelyn, but she spoke without conviction.

"Five, six, ten?" Hewet ventured.

Evelyn seemed to intimate that perhaps ten was the right
figure, but that really it was not a high one.

"I believe you're thinking me a heartless flirt," she protested.
"But I don't care if you are. I don't care what any one
thinks of me. Just because one's interested and likes to be
friends with men, and talk to them as one talks to women, one's
called a flirt."

"But Miss Murgatroyd "

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"I wish you'd call me Evelyn," she interrupted.

"After ten proposals do you honestly think that men are the
same as women?"

"Honestly, honestly, — ^how I hate that word! It's always
used by prigs," cried Evelyn. "Honestly I think they ou^ht
to be. That's what's so disappointing. Every time one thinks
it's not going to happen, and every time it does."

"The pursuit of Friendship," said Hewet. "The title of a
comedy."

"You're horrid," she cried. "You don't care a bit really.
You might be Mr. Hirst."

"Well," said Hewet, "let's consider. Let us consider — " He
paused, because for the moment he could not remember what
it was that they had to consider. He was far more interested
in her than in her story, for as she went on speaking his numb-
ness had disappeared, and he was conscious of a mixture of
liking, pity, and distrust. "You've promised to marry both
Oliver and Perrott ?" he concluded.

"Not exactly promised," said Evelyn. "I can't make up my
mind which I really like best. Oh how I detest modem life !"
she flung off. "It must have been so much easier for the Eliza-
bethans! I thought the other day on that mountain how I'd
have liked to be one of those colonists, to cut down trees and
make laws and all that, instead of fooling about with all these
people who think one's just a pretty young lady. Though I'm
not. I really might do something." She reflected in silence
for a minute. Then she said :

"I'm afraid right down in my heart that Alfred Perrott won't
do. He's not strong, is he ?"

"Perhaps he couldn't cut down a tree," said Hewet. "Have
you never cared for anybody ?" he asked.

"I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them," she
said. "I suppose I'm too fastidious. All my life I've wanted
somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and
splendid. Most men are so small."

"What d'you mean by splendid?" Hewet asked. *TPeople
are — nothing more."

Evel)m was puzzled.

"We don't care for people because of their qualities," he

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tried to explain. "It's just them that we care for," — he
struck a match — "just that," he said, pointing to the flames.

"I see what you mean," she said, "but I don't agree. I do
know why I care for people, and I think I'm hardly ever wrong.
I see at once what they've got in them. Now I think you must
be rather splendid ; but not Mr. Hirst."

Hewet shook his head.

"He's not nearly so unselfish, or so sympathetic, or so big, or
so understanding," Evelyn continued.

Hewet sat silent, smoking his cigarette.

"I should hate cutting down trees," he remarked.

"I'm not trying to flirt with you, though I suppose you think
I am !" Evelyn shot out. "I'd never have come to you if I'd
thought you'd merely think odious things of me !" The tears
came into her eyes.

"Do you never flirt ?" he asked.

"Of course I don't," she protested. "Haven't I told you? I
want friendship; I want to care for some one greater and
nobler than I am, and if they fall in love with me it isn't my
fault ; I don't want it; I positively hate it."

Hewet could see that there was very little use in going on
with the conversation, for it was obvious that Evelyn did not
wish to say anything in particular, but to impress upon him an
image of herself, being, for some reason which she would not
reveal, unhappy, or insecure. He was very tired, and a pale
waiter kept walking ostentatiously into the middle of the room
and looking at them meaningly.

"They want to shut up," he said. "My advice is that you
should tell Oliver and Perrott to-morrow that you've made up
your mind that you don't mean to marry either of them. I'm
certain you don't. If you change your mind you can always
tell them so. They're both sensible men; they'll understand.
And then all this bother will be over.'* He got up.

But Evelyn did not move. She sat looking up at him with
her bright eager eyes, in the depths of which he thought he de-
tected some disappointment, or dissatisfaction.

"Good-night,'* he said.

"There are heaps of things I want to say to you still," she

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said. "And I'm going to, some time. I suppose you must go
to bed now ?"

"Yes," said Hewet. "I'm half asleep." He left her still sit-
ting by herself in the empty hall.

"Why is it that they won't be honest?" he muttered to him-
self as he went upstairs. Why was it that relations between
different people were so unsatisfactory, so fragmentary, so haz-
ardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise
with another human being was an instinct to be examined
carefully and probably crushed? What had Evelyn really
wished to say to him? What was she feeling left alone in the
empty hall? The mystery of life and the unreality even of
one's own sensations overcame him as he walked down the
corridor which led to his room. It was dimly lighted, but suf-
ficiently for him to see a figure in a bright dressing-gown pass
swiftly in front of him, the figure of a woman crossing from
one room to another.

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CHAPTER XV

WHETHER too slight or too vague the ties that bind peo-
ple casually meeting in a hotel at midnight, they possess
one advantage at least over the bonds which unite the elderly,
who have Jived together once and so must live for ever. Slight
they may be, but vivid and genuine, merely because the power
to break them is within the gra^p of each, and there is no rea-
son for continuance except a true desire that continue they
shall. When two people have been married for years they
seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so
that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do
not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience
all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness. The joint
lives of Ridley and Helen had arrived at this stage of com-
munity, and it was often necessary for one or the other to re-
call with an effort whether a thing had been said or only
thought, shared or dreamt in private. At four, o'clock in the
afternoon two or three days later Mrs. Ambrose was standing
brushing her hair, while her husband was in the dressing-room
which opened out of her room, and occasionally, through the
cascade of water — he was washing his face — she caught ex-
clamations, "So it goes on year after year; I wish, I wish, I
wish I could make an end of it," to which she paid no atten-
tion.

"It's white? Or only brown?" Thus she herself mur-
mured, examining a hair which gleamed suspiciously among
the brown. She pulled it out and laid it on the dressing-table.
She was criticising her own appearance, or rather approving
of it, standing a little way back from the glass and looking at
her own face with superb pride and melancholy, when her hus-
band appeared in the doorway in his shirt sleeves, his face half
obscured by a towel.

"You often tell me I don't notice things," he remarked.

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"Tell me if this is a white hair, then?" she replied. She laid
the hair on his hand.

"There's not a white hair on your head," he exclaimed.

"Ah, Ridley, I begin to doubt," she sighed ; and bowed her
head under his eyes so that he might judge, but the inspection
produced only a kiss where the line of parting ran, and hus-
band and wife then proceeded to move about the room,
casually murmuring.

"What was that you were saying?" Helen remarked, after
an interval of conversation which no third person could have
understood.

"Rachel — you ought to keep an eye upon Rachel," he ob-
served significantly, and Helen, though she went on brushing
her hair, looked at him. His observations were apt to be true.

"Young gentlemen don't interest themselves in young wom-
en's education without a motive," he remarked.

"Oh, Hirst," said Helen.

"Hirst and Hewet, they're all the same to me — all covered
with spots," he replied. "He advises her to read Gibbon. Did
you know that?"

Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself in-
ferior to her husband in powers of observation. She merely
said:

"Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man
we met at the dance— even Mr. Dalloway — even "

"I advise you to be circumspect," said Ridley. "There's Wil-
loughby, remember — Willoughby" ; he pointed at a letter.

Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her
dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive,
perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, en-
quiring after his daughter's manners and morals — ^hoping she
wasn't a bore, and bidding them pack her off to him on board
the very next ship if she were — and then grateful and affec-
tionate with suppressed emotion, and then half a page about
his own triumphs over wretched little natives who went on
strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English
oaths at them, "popping my head out of the window just as I
was, in my shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter."

"If Theresa married Willoughby," she remarked, turning the

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page with a hairpin, "one doesn't see what's to prevent Ra-
chel "

But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected
with the washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the fre-
quent visits of Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a
dry stick of a man, and yet Ridley couldn't simply point at the
•door and tell him to go. The truth of it was, they saw too
many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal talk pat-
tering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to go
down to tea.

The first thing that caught Helen's eye as she came down-
stairs was a carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feath-
ers nodding on the tops of hats. She had only time to gain
the drawing-room before two names were oddly mispronounced
by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thombury came in slightly
in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

"Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing," said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave
of her hand. "A friend of our common friend Mrs. Ray-
mond Parry."

Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman
of forty perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust,
though not as tall as the upright carriage of her body made
her appear.

She looked Helen straight in the face and said, "You have a
charmin' house."

She had a strongly marked face, her eyes looked straight
at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner
she was nervous at the same time. Mrs. Thombury acted as
interpreter, making things smooth all round by a series of
charming commonplace remarks.

"I've taken it upon myself, Mr. Ambrose," she said, "to
promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs. Flushing the
benefit of your experience. I'm sure no one here knows the
country as well as you do. No one takes such wonderful long
walks. No one, I'm sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge
upon every subject. Mr. Wilfrid Flushing is a collector. He
has discovered really beautiful things already. I had no notion
that the peasants were so artistic — ^though of course in the
past "

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"Not old things — ^new things," interrupted Mrs. Flushing^
curtly. "That is, if he takes my advice."

The Ambroses had not lived for many years in London with-
out knowing something of a good many people, by name at
least, and Helen remembered hearing of the Flushings. Mr.
Flushing was a man who kept an old furniture shop ; he had
always said he would not marry because most women have red
cheeks, and would not take a house because most houses have
narrow staircases, and would not eat meat because most ani-
mals bleed when they are killed ; and then he had married an
eccentric aristocratic lady, who certainly was not pale, who-
looked as if she ate meat, who had forced him to do all the
things he most disliked — ^and here then was the lady. Helen
looked at her with interest. They had moved out into the
garden, where the tea was laid under a tree, and Mrs. Flushing
was helping herself to cherry jam. She had a peculiar jerking-
movement of the body when she spoke, which caused the ca-
nary-coloured plume on her hat to jerk too. Her small but
finely cut and vigorous features, together with the deep red of
lips and cheeks, pointed to many generations of well-trained
and well-nourished ancestors behind her.

"Nothin' that's more than twenty years old interests me,"
she continued. "Mouldy old pictures, dirty old books, they
stick 'em in museums when they're only fit for bumin'."

"I quite agree," Helen laughed. "But my husband spends
his life in digging up manuscripts which nobody wants." She
was amused by Ridley's expression of startled disapproval.

"There's a clever man in London called John who paints
ever so much better than the old masters," Mrs. Flushing
continued. "His pictures excite me — ^nothin* that's old excites
me.

"But even his pictures will become old," Mrs. Thombury
intervened.

"Then I'll have 'em burnt, or I'll put it in my will," said Mrs.
Flushing.

"And Mrs. Flushing lived in one of the most beautiful old
houses in England — Chillingley," Mrs. Thornbury explained
to the rest of them.

"If I'd my way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing

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laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once start-
ling and joyless.

"What does any sane person want with those great big
houses?" she demanded. "If you go downstairs after dark
you're covered with black beetles, and the electric lights always
goin' out. What would you do if spiders came out of the tap
when you turned on the hot water ?" she demanded, fixing her
eye on Helen.

Mrs. Ambrose shrugged her shoulders with a smile.

"This is what I like," said Mrs. Flushing. She jerked her
head at the Villa. "A little house in a garden. I had one once
in Ireland. One could lie in bed in the momin' and pick the
roses outside the window with one's toes."

"And the gardeners, weren't they surprised?" Mrs. Thorn-
bury enquired.

"There were no gardeners," Mrs. Flushing chuckled. "No-
body but me and an old woman without any teeth. You know
the poor in Ireland lose their teeth after they're twenty. But
you wouldn't expect a politician to understand that — ^Arthur
Balfour wouldn't understand that."

Ridley sighed that he never expected any one to understand
anything, least of all politicians.

"However," he concluded, "there's one advantage I find in
extreme old age — nothing matters a hang except one's food and
one's digestion. All I ask is to be left alone to moulder away
in solitude. It's obvious that the world's going as fast as it can
to — ^the Nethermost Pit, and all I can do is to sit still and
consume as much of my own smoke as possible." He groaned,
and with a melancholy glance laid the jam on his bread, for
he felt the atmosphere of this abrupt lady distinctly unsym-
pathetic.

"I always contradict my husband when he says that," said
Mrs. Thombury sweetly. "You men ! Where would you be if
it weren't for the women !"

"Read the Symposium," said Ridley grimly.

"Symposiumr' cried Mrs. Flushing. "That's Latin or
Greek ? Tell me, is there a good translation ?"

"No,'' said Ridley. "You will have to learn Greek,"

Mrs. Flushing cried, "Ah, ah, ah! I'd rather break stones

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in the road. I always envy the men who break stones and sit
on those nice little heaps all day wearin' spectacles. I'd in-
finitely rather break stones than clean out poultry runs, or feed
the cows, or "

Here Rachel came up from the lower garden with a book in
her hand.

"What's that book?" said Ridley, when she had shaken
hands.

"It's Gibbon," said Rachel as she sat down.

"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?" said Mrs.
Thornbury. "A very wonderful book, I know. My dear
father was always quoting it at us, with the result that we
resolved never to read a line."

"Gibbon the historian?" enquired Mrs. Flushing. "I con-
nect him with some of the happiest hours of my life. We
used to lie in bed and read Gibbon — ^about the massacres of
the Christians, I remember — when we were supposed to be
asleep. It's no joke, I can tell you, readin' a great big book,
in double columns, by a night-light, and the light that comes
through a chink in the door. Then there were the moths —
tiger moths, yellow moths, and horrid cockchafers. Louisa,
my sister, would have the window open. I wanted it shut.
We fought every night of our lives over that window. Have
you ever seen a moth dyin* in a night-light?" she enquired.

Again there was an interruption. Hewet and Hirst appeared
at the drawing-room window and came up to the tea-table.

Rachel's heart beat hard. She was conscious of an ex-
traordinary intensity in everything, as though their presence
stripped some cover off the surface of things ; but the greetings
were remarkably commonplace.

"Excuse me," said Hirst, rising from his chair directly he
had sat down. He went into the drawing-room, and returned
with a cushion which he placed carefully upon his seat.

"Rheumatism," he remarked, as he sat down for the second
time.

"The result of the dance ?" Helen enquired.

"Whenever I get at all run down I tend to be rheumatic,"
Hirst stated. He bent his wrist back sharply. "I hear little
pieces of chalk grinding together !"

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Rachel looked at him. She was amused, and yet she was
respectful; if such a thing could be, the upper part of her
face seemed to laugh, and the lower part to check its laughter.

Hewet picked up the book that lay on the ground.

"You like this?" he asked in an undertone.

"No, I don't like it," she replied. She had indeed been
tr)ang all the afternoon to read it, and for some reason the
glory which she had perceived at first had faded, and, read as
she would, she could not grasp the meaning with her mind.

"It goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth," she
hazarded. Evidently she meant Hewet alone to hear her
words, but Hirst demanded, "What d'you mean ?"

She was instantly ashamed of her figure of speech, for she
could not explain it in words of sober criticism.

"Surely it's the most perfect style, so far as style goes, that's
ever been invented," he continued. "Every sentence is prac-
tically perfect, and the wit "

"Ugly in body, repulsive in mind," she thought, instead of
thinking about Gibbon's style. "Yes, but strong, searching,
unyielding in mind," she was forced to add. She looked at
his big head, a disproportionate part of which was occupied
by the forehead, and at the direct, severe eyes.

"I give you up in despair," he said. He meant it lightly,
but she took it seriously, and believed that her value as a hu-
man being was lessened because she did not happen to admire
the style of Gibbon. The others were talking now in a group
about the native villages which Mrs. Flushing ought to visit.

"I despair too," she said impetuously. "How are you going
to judge people merely by their minds?"

"You agree with my spinster Aunt, I expect," said St. John
in his jaunty manner, which was always irritating because it
made the person he talked to appear unduly clumsy and in
earnest. " *Be good, sweet maid' — I thought Mr. Kingsley and
my Aunt were now obsolete."

"One can be very nice without having read a book," she
asserted. Very silly and simple her words sounded, and laid
her open to derision.

"Did I ever deny it ?" Hirst enquired, raising his eyebrows.

Most unexpectedly Mrs. Thornbury here intervened, either

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because it was her mission to keep things smooth or because
she had long wished to speak to Mr. Hirst, feeling as she did
that all young men were her sons.

"I have lived all my life with people like your Aunt, Mr.
Hirst," she said, leaning forward in her chair. Her brown
squirrel-like eyes became even brighter than usual. "They
have never heard of Gibbon. They only care for their pheas-
ants and their peasants. They are great big men who look
so fine on horseback, as people must have done, I think, in
the days of the great wars. Say what you like against them
— they are animal, they are unintellectual ; they don't read
themselves, and they don't want others to read, but they are
some of the finest and the kindest human beings on the face of
the earth ! You would be surprised at some of the stories I
could tell. You have never guessed, perhaps, at all the ro-
mances that go on in the heart of the country. Those are
the people, I feel, among whom Shakespeare will be born if he
is ever bom again. In those old houses, up among the
Downs *'

"My Aunt," Hirst interrupted, "spends her life in East
Lambeth among the degraded poor. I only quoted my Aunt
because she is inclined to persecute people she calls 'intellec-
tual,' which is what I suspect Miss Vinrace of doing. It's all
the fashion now. If you're clever it's always taken for granted
that you're completely without sympathy, understanding, af-
fection — all the things that really matter. Oh, you Christians !
You're the most conceited, patronising, hypocritical set of old
humbugs in the kingdom ! Of course," he continued, "I'm the
first to allow your country gentlemen great merits. For one
thing, they're probably quite frank about their passions, which
we are not. My father, who is a clergyman in Norfolk, says
that there is hardly a squire in the county who does not "

"But about Gibbon?" Hewet interrupted. The look of ner-
vous tension which had come over every face was relaxed by
the interruption.

"You find him monotonous, I suppose. But you know "

He opened the book, and began searching for passages to read
aloud, and in a little time he found a good one which he con-
sidered suitable. But there was nothing in the world that bored

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Ridley more than being reac» aloud to, and he was besides
scrupulously fastidious as to t^ie dress and behaviour of ladies.
In the space of fifteen minutes he had decided against Mrs.
Flushing on the ground that her orange plume did not suit her
complexion, that she spoke too loud, that she crossed her legs,
and finally, when he saw her accept a cigarette that Hewet
offered her, he jumped up, exclaiming something about "bar
parlours," and left them. Mrs. Flushing was evidently relieved
by his departure. She puffed her cigarette, stuck her legs out,
and examined Helen closely as to the character and reputation
of their common friend, Mrs. Raymond Parry. By a series
of little stratagems she drove her to define Mrs. Parry as
somewhat elderly, by no means beautiful, very much made up
— an insolent old harridan, in short, whose parties were amus-
ing because one met odd people; but Helen herself always
pitied poor Mr. Parry, who was understood to be shut up
downstairs with cases full of gems, while his wife enjoyed
herself in the drawing-room. "Not that I believe what people
say against her — although she hints, of course — " Upon which
Mrs. Flushing cried out with delight:

"She's my first cousin ! Gk) on — ^go on V

When Mrs. Flushing rose to go she was obviously delighted
with her new acquaintances. She made three or four different
plans for meeting or going on an expedition, or showing Helen
the things they had bought, on her way to the carriage. She
included them all in a vague but magnificent invitation.

As Helen returned to the garden again, Ridley's words of
warning came into her head, and she hesitated a moment, and
looked at Rachel sitting between Hirst and Hewet. But she
could draw no conclusions, for Hewet was still reading Gibbon
aloud, and Rachel, for all the expression she had, might have
been a shell, and his words water rubbing against her ears, as
water rubs a shell on the edge of a rock.

Hewet's voice was very pleasant. When he reached the end
of the period Hewet stopped, and no one volunteered any criti-
cism.

"I do adore the aristocracy!" Hirst exclaimed after a mo-
ment's pause. "They're so amazingly unscrupulous. None of
us would dare to behave as that woman behaves."

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"What I like about them," said Helen as she sat down, "is
that the/re so well put together.* Naked, Mrs. Flushing would
be superb. Dressed as she drej^es, it's absurd, of course."

"Yes," said Hirst. A shade of depression crossed his face*
"I've never weighed more than ten stone in my life," he said,
"which is ridiculous, considering my height, and I've actually
gone down in weight since we came here. I daresay that ac-
counts for the rheumatism." Again he jerked his wrist back
sharply, so that Helen might hear the grinding of the chalk
stones. She couia not help smiling.

"It's no laughing matter for me, I assure you," he protested.
"My mother's a chronic invalid, and I'm always expecting to
be told that I've got heart disease myself. Rheumatism always
goes to the heart in the end."

"For goodness' sake. Hirst," Hewet protested; "one might
think you were an old cripple of eighty. If it comes to that, I
had an aunt who died of cancer myself, but I put a bold face
on it — " He rose and began tilting his chair backwards and
forwards on its hind legs. "Is any one here inclined for a
walk?" he said. "There's a magnificent walk, up behind the
house. You come out on to a cliff and look right down into
the sea. The rocks are all red ; you can see them through the
water. The other day I saw a sight that fairly took my breath
away — ^about twenty jelly-fish, semi-transparent, pink, with
long streamers, floating on the top of the waves."

"Sure they weren't mermaids ?" said Hirst. "It's much too
hot to climb uphill." He looked at Helen, who showed no
signs of moving.

"Yes, it's too hot," Helen decided.

There was a short silence.

"I'd like to come," said Rachel.

"But she might have said that anyhow," Helen thought to
herself as Hewet and Rachel went away together, and Helen
was left alone with St. John, to St. John's obvious satisfac-
tion.

He may have been satisfied, but his usual difficulty in decid-
ing that one subject was more deserving of notice than another
prevented him from speaking for some time. He sat staring
•intently at the head of a dead match, while Helen considered

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—so it seemed from the expression of her eyes — something
not closely connected with the present moment.

At last St. John exclaimed, "Damn! Damn everything!
Damn everybody !" he added. "At Cambridge there are people
to talk to."

"At Cambridge there are people to talk to," Helen echoed
him, rh)rthmically and absent-mindedly. Then she woke up.

"By the way, have you settled what you're going to do —
is it to be Cambridge or the Bar ?"

He pursed his lips, but made no immediate answer, for
Helen was still slightly inattentive. She had been thinking
about Rachel and which of the two young men she was likely
to fall in love with, and now sitting opposite to Hirst she
thought, "He's ugly. It's a pity they're so ugly."

She did not include Hewet in this criticism; she was thinking
of the clever, honest, interesting young men she knew, of
whom Hirst was a good example, and wondering whether it
was necessary that thought and scholarship should thus mal-
treat their bodies, and should thus elevate their minds to a very
high tower from which the human race appeared to them like
rats arid mice squirming on the flat.

"And the future?" she reflected, vaguely envisaging a race
of men becoming more and more like Hirst, and a race of
women becoming more and more like Rachel. "Oh no," she
concluded, glancing at him, "one wouldn't marry you. Well,
then, the future of the race is in the hands of Susan and Ar-
thur; no — ^that's dreadful. Of farm labourers; no — ^not of
the English at all, but of Russians and Chinese." This train
of thought did not satisfy her, and was interrupted by St John,
who began again:

"I wish you knew Bennett. He's the greatest man in the
world."

"Bennett?" she enquired. Becoming more at his ease, St.
John dropped the concentrated abruptness of his manner, and
explained that Bennett was a man who lived in an old wind-
mill six miles out of Cambridge. He lived the perfect life,
according to St. John, very lonely, very simple, caring only for
the truth of things, always ready to talk, and extraordinarily
modest, though his mind was of the greatest.

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"Don't you think/' said St. John, when he had done describ-
ing him, "that kind of thing makes this kind of thing rather
flimsy? Did you notice at tea how poor old Hewet had to
change the conversation ? How they were all ready to pounce
upon me because they thought I was going to say something
improper? It wasn't an3^hing, really. If Bennett had been
there he'd have said exactly what he meant to say, or he'd have
got up and gone. But there's something rather bad for the
character in that — I mean if one hasn't got Bennett's char-
acter. It's inclined to make one bitter. Should you say that
I was bitter?"

Helen did not answer, and he continued :

"Of course I am, disgustingly bitter, and it's a beastly thing
to be. But the worst of me is that I'm so envious. I envy
every one. I can't endure people who do things better than I
do — ^perfectly absurd things too — waiters balancing piles of
plates — even Arthur, because Susan's in love with him. I want
people to like me, and they don't. It's partly my appearance, I
expect," he continued, "though it's an absolute lie to say I've
Jewish blood in me — as a matter of fact we've been in Norfolk,
Hirst of Hirstbourne Hall, for three centuries at least. It
must be awfully soothing to be like you — every one liking
one at once."

"I assure you they don't," Helen laughed.

"They do," said Hirst with conviction. "In the first place,
you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen ; in the second,
you have an exceptionally nice nature."

If Hirst had looked at her instead of looking intently at his
teacup he would have seen Helen blush, partly with pleasure,
partly with an impulse of affection towards the young man who
had seemed, and would seem again, so ugly and so limited. She
pitied him, for she suspected that he suffered, and she was
interested in him, for many of the things he said seemed to her
true ; she admired the morality of youth, and yet she felt im-
prisoned. As if her instinct were to escape to something
brightly coloured and impersonal, which she could hold in her
hands, she went into the house and returned with her em-
broidery. But he was not interested in her embroidery; he
did not even look at it.

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*' About Miss Vinrace," he began, — "oh, look here, do let's
be St. John and Helen, and Rachel and Terence — ^what's she
like ? Does she reason, does she feel, or is she merely a kind
of footstool?"

"Oh, no," said Helen, with great decision. From her ob-
servations at tea she was inclined to doubt whether Hirst was
the person to educate Rachel. She had gradually come to be
interested in her niece, and fond of her; she disliked some
things about her very much, she was amused by others; but
she felt her, on the whole, a live if unformed human being,
experimental, and not always fortunate in her experiments,
but with powers of some kind, and a capacity for feeling.
Somewhere in the depths of her, too, she was bound to Rachel
by the indestructible if inexplicable ties of sex. "She seems
vague, but she's a will of her own," she said, as if in the
interval she had run through her qualities.

The embroidery, which was a matter for thought, the design
being difficult and the colours wanting consideration, brought
lapses into the dialogue when she seemed to be engrossed in,
her skeins of silk, or, with head a little drawn back and eyes
narrowed, considered the effect of the whole. Thus she merely
said, "Um — ^m — m," to St. John's next remark, "I shall ask her
to go for a walk with me."

Perhaps he resented this division of attention. He sat silent
watching Helen closely.

"You're absolutely happy," he proclaimed at last.

"Yes ?" Helen enquired, sticking in her needle.

"Marriage, I suppose," said St. John.

"Yes," said Helen, gently drawing her needle out.

"Children ?" St John enquired.

"Yes," said Helen, sticking her needle in again. "I don't
know why I'm happy," she suddenly laughed, looking him full
in the face. There was a considerable pause.

"There's an abyss between us," said St. John. His voice
sounded as if it issued from the depths of a cavern in the rocks.
"You're infinitely simpler than I am. Women always are, of
course. That's the difficulty. One never knows how a woman
gets there. Supposing all the time you're thinking, 'Oh, what
a morbid young man !' "

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Helen sat and looked at him with her needle in her hand.
From her position she saw his head in front of the dark pyra-
mid of a magnolia-tree. With one foot raised on the rung of
a chair, and her elbow out in the attitude for sewing, her own
figure possessed the sublimity of a woman's of the early world,
spinning the thread of fate — ^the sublimity possessed by many
women of the present day who fall into the attitude required
by scrubbing or sewing. St. John looked at her.

"I suppose you've never paid any one a compliment in the
course of your life," he said irrelevantly.

"I spoil Ridley rather," Helen considered.

"I'm going to ask you point blank — do you like me?"

After a certain pause, she replied, "Yes, certainly."

"Thank God !" he exclaimed. "That's one mercy. You see,"
he continued with emotion, "I'd rather you liked me than any
one I've ever met."

"What about the five philosophers?" said Helen, with a
laugh, stitching firmly and swiftly at her canvas. "I wish
you'd describe them."

Hirst had no particular wish to describe them, but when
he began to consider them he found himself soothed and
strengthened. Far away on the other side of the world as they
were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared
remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be
at ease ; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people
here. They gave him, certainly, what no woman could give
him, not Helen even. Warming at the thought of them, he
went on to lay his own case before Mrs. Ambrose. Should
he stay on at Cambridge or should he go to the Bar? One day
he thought one thing, another day another. Helen listened
attentively. At last, without any preface, she pronoimced her
decision.

"Leave Cambridge and go to the Bar," she said. He pressed
her for her reasons.

"I think you'd enjoy London more," she said. It did not
seem a very subtle reason, but she appeared to think it sufl&-
cient. She looked at him against the background of flowering
magnolia. There was something curious in the sight. Per-
haps it was that the heavy wax-like flowers were so smooth

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and inarticulate, and his face — ^he had thrown his hat away,
his hair was rumpled, he held his eye-glasses in his hand, so
that a red mark appeared on either side of his nose — was so
worried and garrulous. It was a beautiful bush, spreading
very widely, and all the time she had sat there talking she had
been noticing the patches of shade and the shape of the leaves,
and the way the great white flowers sat in the midst of the
green. She had noticed it half -consciously, but nevertheless
the pattern had become part of their talk. She laid down her
sewing, and began to walk up and down the garden, and Hirst
rose too and paced by her side. He was rather disturbed, un-
comfortable, and full of thought. Neither of them spoke.

The sun was beginning to go down, and a change had come
over the mountains, as if they were robbed of their earthly
substance, and composed merely of intense blue mist. Long
thin clouds of flamingo red, with edges like the edges of curled
ostrich feathers, lay up and down the sky at different altitudes.
The roofs of the town seemed to have sunk lower than usual ;
the c)rpresses appeared very black between the roofs, and the
roofs themselves were brown and white. As usual in the eve-
ning, single cries and single bells became audible rising from
beneath.

St. John stopped suddenly.

^^Well, you must take the responsibility," he said. "I've
made up my mind ; I shall go to the Bar."

His words were very serious, almost emotional; they re-
called Helen after a second's hesitation from her dream.

"I'm sure you're right," she said warmly, and shook the hand
he held out. "You'll be a great man, I'm certain."

Then, as if to make him look at the scene, she swept her
hand round the immense circumference of the view. From the
sea, over the roofs of the town, across the crests of the moun-
tains, over the river and the plain, and again across the crests
of the mountains it swept until it reached the villa, the garden,
the magnolia-tree, and the figures of Hirst and herself stand-
ing together, when it dropped to her side.

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CHAPTER XVI

HEWET and Rachel had long ago reached the particular
place on the edge of the cliff where, looking down into
the sea, you might chance on jelly-fish and dolphins. Looking
the other way, the vast expanse of land gave them a sensation
which is given by no view, however extended, in England ; the
villages and the hills there having names, and the farthest hori-
zon of hills as often as not dipping and showing a line of mist
which is the sea ; here the view was one of infinite sun-dried
earth, earth pointed in pinnacles, heaped in vast barriers, earth
widening and spreading away and away like the immense floor
of the sea, earth chequered by day and by night, and partitioned
into different lands, where famous cities were founded, and
the races of men changed from dark savages to white civilised
men, and back to dark savages again. Perhaps their English
blood made this prospect uncomfortably impersonal and hos-
tile to them, for having once turned their faces that way they
next turned them to the sea, and for the rest of the time sat
looking at the sea. The sea, though it was a thin and spark-
ling water here, which seemed incapable of surge or anger,
eventually narrowed itself, clouded its pure tint with grey, and
swirled through narrow channels and dashed in a shiver of
broken waters against massive granite rocks. It was this sea
that .flowed up to the mouth of the Thames ; and the Thames
washed the roots of the city of London.

Hewet's thoughts had followed some such course as this,
for the first thing he said as they stood on the edge of the cliff
was —

'Td like to be in England!"

Rachel lay down on her elbow, and parted the tall grasses
which grew on the edge, so that she might have a clear view.
The water was very calm; rocking up and down at the base
of the cliff, and so clear that one could see the red of the stones

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at the bottom of it. So it had been at the birth of the world,
and so it had remained ever since. Probably no human being
had ever broken that water with boat or with body. Obeying
some impulse, she determined to mar that eternity of peace,
and threw the largest pebble she could find. It struck the
water, and the ripples spread out and out. Hewet looked down
too.

"It's wonderful," he said, as they widened and ceased. The
freshness and the newness seemed to him wonderful. He
threw a pebble next. There was scarcely any sound.

"But England," Rachel murmured in the absorbed tone of
one whose eyes are concentrated upon some sight. "What
d'you want with England?"

"My friends chiefly," he said, "and all the things one does."

He could look at Rachel without her noticing it. She was
still absorbed in the water and the exquisitely pleasant sensa-
tions which a little depth of the sea washing over rocks sug-
gests. He noticed that she was wearing a dress of deep blue
colour, made of a soft thin cotton stuff, which clung to the
shape of her body. It was a body with the angles and hollows
of a yoimg woman's body not yet developed, but in no way
distorted, and thus interesting and even lovable. Raising his
eyes Hewet observed her head ; she had taken her hat off, and
the face rested on her hand. As she looked down into the sea,
her lips were slightly parted. The expression was one of child-
like intentness, as if she were watching for a fish to swim past
over the clear red rocks. Nevertheless her twenty-four years
of life had given her a look of reserve. Her hand, which lay
on the ground, the fingers curling slightly in, was well shaped
and competent ; the square-tipped and nervous fingers were the
fingers of a musician. With something like anguish Hewet
realised that, far from being unattractive, her body was very
attractive to him. She looked up suddenly. Her eyes were
full of eagerness and interest.

"You write novels ?" she asked.

For the moment he could not think what he was sa3ring.
He was overcome with the desire to hold her in his arms.

"Oh, yes," he said. "That is, I want to write them."

She would not take her large grey eyes off his face.

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"Novels," she repeated. "Why do you write novels? You
ought to write music. Music, you see" — she shifted her eyes,
and became less desirable as her brain began to work, inflict-
ing a certain change upon her face — ^"music goes straight for
things. It says all there is to say at once. With writing it
seems to me there's so much" — she paused for an expression,
and rubbed her fingers in the earth — "scratching on the match-
box. Most of the time when I was reading Gibbon this after-
noon I was horribly, oh infernally, damnably bored!" She
gave a shake of laughter, looking at Hewet, who laughed too.

"/ shan't lend you books," he remarked.

"Why is it," Rachel continued, "that I can laugh at Mr.
Hirst to you, but not to his face? At tea I was completely
overwhelmed, not by his ugliness — ^by his mind." She enclosed
a circle in the air with her hands. She realised with a great
sense of comfort how easily she could talk to Hewet, those
thorns or ragged corners which tear the surface of some rela-
tionships being smoothed away.

"So I observed," said Hewet. "That's a thing that never
ceases to amaze me." He had recovered his composure to such
an extent that he could light and smoke a cigarette, and feel-
ing her ease, became happy and easy himself.

"The respect that women, even well-educated, very able
women, have for men," he went on. "I believe we must have
the sort of power over you that we're said to have over horses.
They see us three times as big as we are or they'd never obey
us. For that very reason, I'm inclined to doubt that you'll ever
do anything even when you have the vote." He looked at her
reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and
young. "It'll take at least six generations before you're suf-
ficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices.
Consider what a bully the ordinary man is," he continued, "the
ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of
business with a family to bring up and a certain position to
maintain. And then, of course, the daughters have to give
way to the sons ; the sons have to be educated ; they have to
bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes
over again. And meanwhile there are the women in the back-

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ground. ... Do you really think that the vote will do you any
goodr

"The vote?" Rachel repeated. She had to visualise it as
a little bit of paper which she dropped into a box before she
understood his question, and looking at each other they smiled
at something absurd in the question.

"Not to me," she said. "But I play the piano. . . . Are
men really like that?" she asked, returning to the question that
interested her. "I'm not afraid of you." She looked at him
easily.

"Oh, I'm diflferent," Hewet replied. "IVe got between six
and seven hundred a year of my own. And then no one takes
a novelist seriously, thank heavens. There's no doubt it helps
to make up for the drudgery of a profession if a man's taken
very, very seriously by every one — if he gets appointments,
and has offices and a title, and lots of letters after his name,
and bits of ribbon and degrees. I don't grudge it 'em, though
sometimes it comes over me — ^what an amazing concoction!
What a miracle the masculine conception of life is — judges,
civil servants, army, navy. Houses of Parliament, lord mayors
— ^what a world we've made of it! Look at Hirst now. I
assure you," he said, "not a day's passed since we came here
without a discussion as to whether he's to stay on at Cam-
bridge or to go to the Bar. It's his career — ^his sacred career.
And if I've heard it twenty times, I'm sure his mother and
sister have heard it five hundred times. Can't you imagine
the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed
the rabbits because St. John must have the school-room to him-
self — 'St. John's working,' 'St. John wants his tea brought to
him.' Don't you know the kind of thing? No wonder that St.
John thinks it a matter of considerable importance. It is too.
He has to earn his living. But St. John's sister — " Hewet
puffed in silence. "No one takes her seriously, poor dear.
She feeds the rabbits."

"Yes," said Rachel. "I've fed rabbits for twenty- four years ;
it seems odd now." She looked meditative, and Hewet, who
had been talking much at random and instinctively adopting
the feminine point of view, saw that she would now talk about

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herself, which was what he wanted, for so they might come
to know each other.

She looked back meditatively upon her past life.

"How do you spend your day?" he asked.

She meditated still. When she thought of their day it
seemed to her that it was cut into four pieces by their meals.
These divisions were absolutely rigid, the contents of the day
having to accommodate themselves within the four rigid bars.
Looking back at her life, that was what she saw.

"Breakfast nine; luncheon one; tea five; dinner eight," she
said.

"Well," said Hewet, "what d'you do in the morning?"

"I used to play the piano for hours and hours."

"And after luncheon?"

She summoned before her a tsrpical day's life, and in de-
scribing it became much interested in her narrative; not only
did the actual incidents of her life present themselves vividly
before her, but in describing them to Hewet she was, uncon-
sciously, reviewing her past under the influence of his eyes.
At length she broke off.

"But this isn't very interesting for you."

"Good Lord !" Hewet exclaimed, "I've never been so much
interested in my life." She then realised that while she had
been thinking of Richmond, his eyes had never left her face.
The knowledge of this excited her.

"Go on, please go on," he urged. "Let's imagine it's a
Wednesday. You're all at luncheon. You sit there, and Aunt
Lucy there, and Aunt Clara here ;" he arranged three pebbles
on the grass between them.

"Aunt Clara carves the neck of lamb," Rachel went on, fix-
ing her eyes upon the pebbles and smiling as she conceived in
those stones some resemblance to her aunts. What did they
talk about? She recalled a story about a Mrs. Hunt whose
son had been hugged to death by a bear. Her aunts saw noth-
ing to laugh at, she remembered, in that catastrophe, and now
she looked at Hewet to see whether he shared her own dispo-
sition to think that form of death for the son of Mrs. Hunt
amusing. She was reassured. But she thought it necessary
to apologise again ; she had been talking too much.

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**You can't conceive how it interests me," he said. Indeei,
his cigarette had gone out, and he had to light another. ^

**Why does it interest you ?" she asked.

"Partly because you're a woman," he replied. When he said
this, Rachel, who had become oblivious of anything, and had
reverted to a childlike state of interest and pleasure, lost her
freedom and became self-conscious. She felt herself at once
singular and under observation, as she felt with St. John Hirst.
She was about to launch into an argument which would have
made them both feel bitterly against each other, and to define
sensations which had no such importance as words were bound
to give them when Hewet led her thoughts in a different di-
rection.

"I've often walked along the streets where people live all in
a row, and one house is exactly like another house, and won-
dered what on earth the women were doing inside," he mused.
"Doesn't it make your blood boil ?" he asked suddenly turning
upon her. "I'm sure if I were a woman I'd blow someone's
brains out. But you, I mean — how does it all strike you? Are
you happy?"

His determination to know made it seem important that she
should answer him with strict accuracy ; but instead of reading
a plain answer in her mind, ideas of an incongruous nature
raced past her. Why did he make these demands on her?
Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? No, she
would not consent to be pinned down by any second person in
the whole world. She shifted her position, sighed, and waved
her hand almost with a gesture of weariness towards the sea.
She was only weary of him and his questions, Hewet divined,
not of what she saw out there.

A feeling of extreme depression came over him. It seemed
plain that she would never care for one person rather than
another; she was evidently indifferent to him; near though he
had thought them they were now far apart; and the gesture
with which she turned from him had been oddly beautiful.

"I like walking alone, and knowing I don't matter a damn
to anybody," she said. "I like the freedom of it — I like . . ."
She did not finish the sentence as if she did not think it worth
while.

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."Nonsense," Hewet replied abruptly. "You like people.
Yoti like admiration. Your real grudge against Hirst is that
he doesn't admire you."

She made no answer for some time. Then she said :

"That's probably true. Of course I like people — ^I like al-
most every one I've ever met."

She turned her back on the sea and regarded Hewet with
friendly if critical eyes. He was good-looking in the sense
that he had always had a sufficiency of beef to eat and fresh
air to breathe. His head was big; the eyes were also large;
though generally vague they could be forcible; and the lips
were sensitive. One might accoimt him a man of considerable
passion and fitful energy, likely to be at the mercy of moods
which had little relation to facts ; at once tolerant and fastidi-
ous. The breadth of his forehead showed capacity for thought.
The interest with which Rachel looked at him was heard in her
voice.

"What novels do you write ?" she asked.

"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said ; "the things
people don't say. But the difficulty is immense." He sighed.
"However, you don't care," he continued. He looked at her
almost severely. "Nobody cares. Never mind. It's the only
thing worth doing." Whether or no he found the contempla-
tion of the art of fiction so satisfactory as to drive all other
wishes from his mind, he looked to Rachel as if he had for-
gotten her prestnce, or was annoyed by it In his turn he
looked out to sea. She was instantly depressed. As he talked
of writing he had become suddenly impersonal. He might
never care for any one ; all that desire to know her and get at
her, which she had felt pressing on her almost painfully, had
completely vanished.

"Are you a good writer?" she asked shyly.

"Yes," he said. "I'm not first-rate, of course ; I'm good sec-
ond-rate; about as good as Thackeray, I should say."

Rachel was amazed. For one thing it amazed her to hear
Thackeray called second-rate; and then she could not widen
her point of view to believe that there could be great writers
in existence at the present day, or if there were, that any one

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she knew could be a great writer; and his self-confidence as-
tounded her, and he became more and more remote. ^

"My other novel," Hewet continued, "is about a young man
who is obsessed by an idea — ^the idea of being a gentleman. He
manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year.
He has a coat ! it was once a very good coat. But the trous-
ers — ^they're not so good. Well, he goes up to London, gets
into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the
banks of the Serpentine. He is led into telling lies — my idea,
you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul — calls
himself the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire.
Meanwhile the coat becomes older and older, and he hardly
dares to wear the trousers. Can't you imagine the wretched
man, after some splendid evening of debauchery, contemplat-
ing these garments — hanging them over the end of the bed,
arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering
whether they will survive him, or he will survive them?
Thoughts of suicide cross his mind. He has a friend, too, a
man who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which
he sets traps in the fields near Uxbridge. They're scholars,
both of them. I know one or two wretched starving creatures
like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried herring and
a pint of porter. Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at
some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances.
Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the
good fortune to stop, is the daughter of a very fine old Tory
peer. I'm going to describe the kind of parties I once went to
— the fashionable intellectuals, you know, who like to have the
latest book on their tables. They give parties, river parties,
parties where you play games. There's no difficulty in con-
ceiving incidents ; the difficulty is to put them into shape — ^not
to get run away with, as Lady Theo was. It ended disastrously

for her, poor woman " He chewed a piece of grass and

perhaps continued the fortunes of Lady Theo Bingham Bing-
ley in silence. If so, he soon disposed of her; for his next
remark had reference to himself. "I'm not like Hirst," he
said meditatively.

Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a cer-

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tain amount of bewilderment. They both sat thinking their
dv^m thoughts.

"Vm not like Hirst," said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke
meditatively ; "I don't see circles of chalk between people's feet.
I sometimes wish I did. It seems to me so tremendously com-
plicated and confused. One can't come to any decision at all ;
one's less and less capable of making judgments. D'you find
that? And then one never knows what any one feels. We're
all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine any-
thing more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another
person ?"

As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and
rearranging in the grass the stones which had represented
Rachel and her aunts at luncheon. He was speaking as much
to himself as to Rachel. He was reasoning against the de-
sire, which had returned with intensity, to take her in his arms ;
to have done with indirectness ; to explain exactly what he felt.
What he said was against his belief ; all the things that were
important about her he knew. At the same time he was ex-
tremely anxious to know what Rachel's opinion of him might
be. Did she like him? As if she heard him ask the question,

she said: "I like you '* She hesitated. "D'you like me?*'

she asked.

"I like you immensely," Hewet replied, speaking with the
relief of a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity
of saying what he wants to say. He stopped moving the peb-
bles.

"Mightn't we call each other Rachel and Terence?" he asked.

"Terence," Rachel repeated. 'Terence — that's like the cry
of an owl."

She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking
at Terence with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by
the change that had come over the sky behind them. The sub-
stantial blue day had faded to a paler and more ethereal blue ;
the clouds were pink, far away and closely packed together;
and the peace of evening had replaced the heat of the southern
afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.

"It must be late !" she exclaimed.

It was nearly eight o'clock.

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"But eight o'clock doesn't count here, does it?" Terence
asked, as they got up and turned inland again. They began
to walk rather quickly down the hill on a little path between the
olive trees. Terence walked in front, for there was not room
for them side by side and though they felt more intimate be-
cause they shared the knowledge of what eight o'clock in Rich-
mond meant, they could now only toss remarks backwards and
forwards, and their conversation had come to an end. "5ere's
your gate," he said, pushing it open when they reached the
villa, and as she passed through he stood in hesitation. She,
too, paused. She could not ask him to come in. She could
not say that she hoped they would meet again ; there was noth-
ing to be said, and so without a word she went up the path,
and was soon invisible. Directly Hewet lost sight of her, he
felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than before.
Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he was
beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what
had they been able to say ? He ran his mind over the things
they had said, the random, unnecessary things which had
eddied round and round and used up all the time, and drawn
them so close together and flung them so far apart, and left
him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she felt and
of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking,
merely talking?

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CHAPTER XVII

IT was now the height of the season, and every ship that came
from England left a few people on the shores of Santa
Marina who drove up to the hotel. The fact that the Am-
broses had a house where one could escape momentarily from
the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was a source of
genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
Elliots, the Thomburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M.,
together with other people whose identity was so little devel-
oped that the Ambroses did not discover that they possessed
names. By degrees there was established a kind of correspond-
ence between the two houses, the big and the small, so that
at most hours of the day one house could guess what was go-
ing on in the other, and the words "the villa" and "the hotel"
called up the idea of two separate systems of life. Acquain-
tances showed signs of developing into friends, for that one tie
to Mrs. Parry's drawing-room had inevitably split into many
other ties attached to different parts of England, and some-
times these alliances seemed cynically fragile, and sometimes
painfully acute, lacking as they did the supporting background
of organised English life. One night when the moon was
round between the trees, Evel)m M. told Helen the story of
her life, and claimed her everlasting friendship ; on another oc-
casion, merely because of a sigh, or a pause, or a word thought-
lessly dropped, poor Mrs. Elliot left the villa half in tears,
vowing never again to meet the cold and scornful woman who
had insulted her, and in truth, meet again they never did. It
did not seem worth while to piece together so slight a friend-
ship.

Hewet, indeed, might have found excellent material at this
time up at the villa for some chapters in the novel which was
to be called "Silence, or the Things People Don't Say." Helen
and Rachel had become very silent. Having detected, as she

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thought, a secret, and judging that Rachel meant to keep it
from her, Mrs. Ambrose respected it carefully, but from that
cause, though unintentionally, a curious atmosphere of reserve
grew up between them. Instead of sharing their views upon
all subjects, and plunging after an idea wherever it might lead,
they spoke chiefly in comment upon the people they sa^, and
the secret between them made itself felt in what they said even
of Thomburys and Elliots. Always calm and unemotional in
her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely
pessimistic. She was not severe upon individuals so much as
incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what happens in
the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverse
to people in proportion as they deserved well. Even this theory
she was ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos
triiunphant, things happening for no reason at all, and every
one groping about in illusion and ignorance. With a certain
pleasure she developed these views to her niece, taking a letter
from home as her text: which gave good news, but might just
as well have given bad. How did she know that at this very
moment both her children were not lying dead, crushed by
motor omnibuses ? "It's happening to somebody: why shouldn't
it happen to me ?" she would argue, her face taJcing on the stoi-
cal expression of anticipated sorrow. However sincere these
views may have been, they were undoubtedly called forth by
the irrational state of her niece's mind. It was so fluctuating,
and went so quickly from joy to despair, that it seemed neces-
sary to confront it with some stable opinion which naturally
became dark as well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose had
some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she might
discover what was in Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to
judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing
that was said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed
Helen's theories down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridi-
cule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at what she
called the "croaking of a raven in the mud."

"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.

"What's hard?" Helen demanded.

"life," she replied, and then they both became silent.

Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was

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hard, as to why an hour later, perhaps, life was something so
wonderful and vivid that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were
positively exhilarating to a spectator. True to her creed, she
did not attempt to interfere, although there were enough of
those weak moments of depression to make it perfectly easy
for a less scrupulous person to press through and know all, and
perhaps Rachel was sorry that she did not choose. All these
moods ran themselves into one general effect, which Helen
compared to the sliding of a river, quick, quicker, quicker
still, as it races to a waterfall. Her instinct was to cry out
Stop! but even had there been any use in crying Stop! she
would have refrained, thinking it best that things should take
their way, the water racing because the earth was shaped to
make it race.

It seemed that Rachel herself had no suspicion that she was
watched, or that there was anything in her manner likely to
draw attention to her. What had happened to her she did not
know. Her mind was very much in the condition of the racing
water to which Helen compared it. She wanted to see Ter*
ence ; she was perpetually wishing to see him when he was not
there; it was an agony to miss seeing him; agonies were
strewn all about her day on account of him, but she never
asked herself what this force driving through her life arose
from. She thought of no result any more than a tree perpetu-
ally pressed downwards by the wind considers the result of
being pressed downwards by the wind.

During the two or three weeks which had passed since their
walk, half a dozen notes from him had accumulated in her
drawer. She would read them, and spend the whole morning
in a daze of happiness; the sunny land outside the window
being no less capable of analysing its own colour and heat than
she was of analysing hers. In these moods she found it im-
possible to read or play the piano, even to move being beyond
her inclination. The time passed without her noticing it.
When it was dark she was drawn to the window by the lights
of the hotel. A light that went in and out was the light in Ter-
ence's window : there he sat, reading perhaps, or now he was
walking up and down pulling out one book after another ; and
now he was seated in his chair again, and she tried to imagine

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what he was thinking about. The steady lights marked the
rooms where Terence sat with people moving round him.
Every one who stayed in the hotel had a peculiar romance
and interest about them. They were not ordinary people. She
would attribute wisdom to Mrs. Elliot, beauty to Susan War-
rington, a splendid vitality to Evelyn M., because Terence
spoke to them. As unreflecting and pervasive were the moods
of depression. Her mind was as the landscape outside when
dark beneath clouds and straitly lashed by wind and haiL
Again she would sit passive in her chair exposed to pain, and
Helen's fantastical or gloomy words were like so many darts
goading her to cry out against the hardness of life. Best of
all were the moods when for no reason again this stress of
feeling slackened, and Hfe went on as usual, only with a joy
and colour in its events that was unknown before ; they had a
significance like that which she had seen in the tree : the nights
were black bars separating her from the days ; she would have
Kked to run both nights and days into one long continuity of
sensation. Although these moods were directly or indirectly
caused by the presence of Terence or the thought of him, she
never said to herself that she was in love with him, or con*
sidered what was to happen if she continued to feel such things,
so that Helen's image of the river sliding on to the waterfall
had a great likeness to the facts, and the alarm which Helen
sometimes felt was justified.

In her curious condition of unanalysed sensations she was
incapable of making a plan which should have any effect upon
her state of mind. She abandoned herself to the mercy of
accidents, missing Terence one day, meeting him the next, re-
ceiving his letters always with a start of surprise. Any woman
experienced in the progress of courtship would have come by^
certain opinions from all this which would have given her at
least a theory to go upon ; but no one had ever been in love with
Rachel, and she had never been in love with anyone. More-
over, none of the books she read, from Wuthering Heights
to Man and Superman, and the plays of Ibsen, suggested froi»
their analysis of love that what their heroines felt was what
she was feeling now. It seemed to her that her sensations had
no name.

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She met Terence frequently. When they did not meet, he
was apt to send a note with a book or about a book, for he had
not been able after all to neglect that approach to intimacy.
But sometimes he did not come or did not write for several
days at a time. Again when they met their meeting might
be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair. Over all their
partings hung the sense of interruption, leaving them both
unsatisfied, though ignorant that the other shared the feeling.

If Rachel was ignorant of her own feelings, she was even
more completely ignorant of his. At first he moved as a god ;
as she came to know him better he was still the centre of light,
but combined with this beauty a wonderful power of making
her daring and confident of herself. She was conscious of
emotions and powers which she had never suspected in herself,
and of a depth in the world hitherto unknown. When she
thought of their relationship she saw rather than reasoned,
representing her view of what Terence felt by a picture of
him drawn across the room to stand by her side. This passage
across the room amounted to a physical sensation, but what it
meant she did not know.

Thus the time went on, wearing a calm, bright look upon
its surface. Letters came from England, letters came from
Willoughby, and the days accumulated their small events which
shaped the year. Superficially, three odes of Pindar were
mended, Helen covered about five inches of her embroidery,
and St. John completed the first two acts of a play. He and
Rachel being now very good friends, he read them aloud to
her, and she was so genuinely impressed by the skill of his
rhythms and the variety of his adjectives, as well as by the
fact that he was Terence's friend, that he began to wonder
whether he was not intended for literature rather than for law.
It was a time of profound thought and sudden revelations for
more than one couple, and for several single people.

A Sunday came, which no one in the villa with the exception
of Rachel and the Spanish maid proposed to recognise. Ra-
chel still went to church, because she had never, according to
Helen, taken the trouble to think about it. Since they had cele-
brated the service at the hotel she went there expecting to get
some pleasure from her passage across the garden and through

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the hall of the hotel, although it was very doubtful whether she
would see Terence, or at any rate have the chance of speaking
to him.

As the greater number of visitors at the hotel were English,
there was almost as much difference between Sunday and Wed-
nesday as there is in England, and Sunday appeared here as
there, the mute black ghost or penitent spirit of the busy week-
day. The English could not pale the sunshine, but they could
in some miraculous way slow down the hours, dull the inci-
dents, lengthen the meals, and make even the servants and
page-boys wear a look of boredom and propriety. The best
clothes which every one put on helped the general effect; it
seemed that no lady could sit down without bending a clean
starched petticoat, and no gentleman could breathe without a
sudden crackle from a stiff shirt-front.

As the hands of the clock neared eleven, on this particular
Sunday, various people tended to draw together in the hall,
clasping little red-leaved books in their hands. The clock
marked a few minutes to the hour when a stout black figure
passed through the hall with a preoccupied expression, as
though he would rather not recognise salutations, although
aware of them, and disappeared down the corridor which led
from It.

"Mr. Bax," Mrs. Thombury whispered.

The little group of people then began to move off in the same
direction as the stout black figure. Looked at in an odd way
by people who made no effort to join them, they moved with
one exception slowly and consciously towards the stairs. Mrs.
Flushing was the exception. She came running downstairs,
strode across the hall, joined the procession much out of
breath, demanding of Mrs. Thornbury in an agitated whisper,
"Where, where?"

"We are all going," said Mrs. Thornbury gently, and soon
they were descending the stairs two by two. Rachel was
among the first to descend. She did not see that Terence and
Hirst came in at the rear possessed of no black volume, but of
one thin book bound in light-blue cloth, which St. John carried
under his arm.
The chapel was the old chapel of the monks. It was a pro-

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found cool place where they had said Mass for hundreds of
years, and done penance in the cold moonlight, and wor-
shipped old brown pictures and carved saints which stood with
upraised hands of blessing in the hollows in the walls. The
transition from Catholic to Protestant worship had been
bridged by a time of disuse, when there were no services, and
the place was used for storing jars of oil, liqueur, and deck-
chairs ; the hotel flourishing, some religious body had taken the
place in hand, and it was now fitted out with a number of
glazed yellow benches, and claret-coloured footstools ; it had a
small pulpit, and a brass eagle carrying the Bible on its back,
while the piety of different women had supplied ugly squares
of carpet, and long strips of embroidery heavily wrought with
monograms in gold.

As the congregation entered they were met by mild sweet
chords issuing from a harmonium, seated at which Miss Willett
struck emphatic chords with uncertain fingers. The sound
spread through the chapel as the rings of water spread from
a fallen stone. The twenty or twenty-five people who com-
posed the congregation first bowed their heads and then sat up
and looked about them. It was very quiet, and the light down
here seemed paler than the light above. The usual bows and
smiles were dispensed with, but they recognised each other.
The Lord's Prayer was read over them. As the childlike bab-
ble of voices rose, the congregation, many of whom had only
met on the staircase, felt themselves pathetically united and
well-disposed towards each other. As if the prayer were a
torch applied to fuel, a smoke seemed to rise automatically and
fill the place with the ghosts of innumerable services on innu-
merable Sunday mornings at home. Susan Warrington in
particular was conscious of the sweetest sense of sisterhood,
as she covered her face with her hands and saw slips of bent
backs through the chinks between her fingers. Her emotions
rose calmly and evenly, approving of herself and of life at the
same time. It was all so quiet and so good. But having cre-
ated this peaceful atmosphere Mr. Bax suddenly turned the
page and re^d a psalm. Though he read it with no change of
voice the mood was broken.

"Be merciful unto me, O God," he read, "for man goeth

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about to devour me: he is daily fighting and troubling me. . . .
They daily mistake my words: all that they imagine is to do
me evil. They hold all together and keep themselves close. . . .
Break their teeth, O God, in their mouths ; smite the jaw-bones
of the lions, O Lord : let them fall away like water that run-
neth apace; and when they shoot their arrows let them be
rooted out."

Nothing in Susan's experience at all corresponded with this,
and as she had no love of language she had long ceased to at-
tend to such remarks, although she followed them with the
same kind of mechanical respect with which she heard many of
Lear's speeches read aloud. Her mind was still serene and
really occupied with praise of her own nature and praise of
God — that is of the solemn and satisfactory order of the world.

But it could be seen from a glance at their faces that most
of the others, the men in particular, felt the inconvenience of
the sudden intrusion of this old savage. They looked more
secular and critical as they listened to the ravings of the old
black man with a cloth round his loins cursing with vehement
gesture by a camp-fire in the desert. After that there was a
general sound of pages being turned as if they were in class,
and then they read a little bit of the Old Testament about
making a well, very much as school boys translate an easy
passage from the Anabasis when they have shut up their
French grammar. Then they returned to the New Testament
and the sad and beautiful figure of Christ. While Christ spoke
they made another effort to fit his interpretation of life upon
the lives they lived, but as they were all very different, some
practical, some ambitious, some stupid, some wild and experi-
mental, some in love, and others long past any feeling except
a feeling of comfort, they did very different things with the
words of Christ.

From their faces it seemed that for the most part they made
no effort at all, and, recumbent as it were, accepted the ideas
that the words gave as representing goodness, in the same way,
no doubt, as one of those industrious needlewomen had ac-
cepted th^ bright ugly pattern on her mat as representing
beauty.

Whatever the reason might be, for the first time in her life.

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instead of slipping at once into some curious pleasant cloud of
emotion, too familiar to be considered, Rachel listened criti-
cally to what was being said. By the time they had swung in
an irregular way from prayer to psalm, from psalm to history,
from history to poetry, and Mr. Bax was giving out his text,
she was in a state of acute discomfort. Such was the discom-
fort she felt when forced to sit through an unsatisfactory piece
of music badly played. Tantalised, enraged by the clumsy in-
sensitiveness of the conductor, who put the stress on the wrong
places, and annoyed by the vast flock of the audience tamely-
praising and acquiescing without knowing or caring, so she was
now tantalised and enraged, only here, with eyes half-shut and
lips pursed together, the atmosphere of forced solemnity in-
creased her anger. All round her were people pretending to
feel what they did not feel, while somewhere above her floated
the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they
pretended to grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful
idea, an idea like a butterfly. One after another, vast and hard
and cold, appeared to her the churches all over the world where
this blundering effort and misunderstanding were perpetually
going on, great buildings, filled with innumerable men and
women, not seeing clearly, who finally gave up the effort to see,
and relapsed tamely into praise and acquiescence, half-shutting
their eyes and pursing up their lips. The thought had the same
sort of physical discomfort that is caused by a film of mist
always coming between the eyes and the printed page. She did
her best to brush away the film and to conceive something to
be worshipped as the service went on, but failed, always mis-
led by the voice of Mr. Bax saying things which misrepre-
sented the idea, and by the patter of baaing inexpressive hu-
man voices falling round her like damp leaves. The effort was
tiring and dispiriting. She ceased to listen, and fixed her eyes
on the face of a woman near her, a hospital nurse, whose ex-
pression of devout attention seemed to prove that she was at
any rate receiving satisfaction. But looking at her carefully
she came to the conclusion that the hospital nurse was only
slavishly acquiescent, and that the look of satisfaction was pro-
duced by no splendid conception of God within her. How,
indeed, could she conceive anything far outside her own experi-

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ence, a woman with a commonplace face like hers, a little round
red face, upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn
lines, whose weak blue eyes saw without intensity or individu-
ality, whose features were blurred, insensitive, and callous?
She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging to it, so
the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet ;
nothing would tear her from her demure belief in her own
virtue and the virtues of her religion. She was a limpet, with
the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock, for ever dead to the
rush of fresh and beautiful things past her. The face of this
single worshipper became printed on Rachel's mmd with an
impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed
to her what Helen meant and St. John meant when they pro-
claimed their hatred of Christianity. With the violence that
now marked her feelings, she rejected all that she had before
implicitly believed.

Meanwhile Mr. Bax was half-way through the second les-
son. She looked at him. He was a man of the world with
supple lips and an agreeable manner, he was indeed a man of
much kindliness and simplicity, though by no means clever, but
she was not in the mood to give any one credit for such quali-
ties, and examined him as though he were an epitome of all the
vices of his service.

Right at the back of the chapel Mrs. Flushing, Hirst, and
Hewet sat in a row in a very different frame of mind. Hewet
was staring at the roof with his legs stuck out in front of him,
for as he had never tried to make the service fit any feeling
or idea of his, he was able to enjoy the beauty of the language
without hindrance. His mind was occupied first with acciden-
tal things, such as the women's hair in front of him, and the
light on the faces ; then with the words which seemed to him
magnificent, and then more vaguely with the characters of the
other worshippers. But when he suddenly perceived Rachel,
all these thoughts were driven out of his head, and he thought
only of her. The psalms, the prayers, the Litany, and the
sermon were all reduced to one chanting sound which paused,
and then renewed itself, a little higher or a little lower. He
stared alternately at Rachel and at the ceiling, but his expres-
sion was now produced not by what he saw but by something

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in his mind. He was almost as painfully disturbed by his
thoughts as she was by hers.

Early in the service Mrs. Flushing had discovered that she
had taken up a Bible instead of a prayer-book, and, as she was
sitting next to Hirst, she stole a glance over his shoulder. He
was reading steadily in the thin pale-blue volume. Unable to
understand, she peered closer, upon which Hirst politely laid
the book before her, pointing to the first line of a Greek poem
and then to the translation opposite.

"What's that?" she whispered inquisitively.

"Sappho," he replied. "The one Swinburne did — the best
thing that's ever been written."

Mrs. Flushing could not resist such an opportunity. She
gulped down the Ode to Aphrodite during the Litany, keeping^
herself with difficulty from asking when Sappho lived, and
what else she wrote worth reading, and contriving to come in
punctually at the end with "the forgiveness of sins, the Resur-
rection of the body, and the life everlastin'. Amen."

Meanwhile Hirst took out an envelope and began scribbling
on the back of it. When Mr. Bax mounted the pulpit he shut
up Sappho with his envelope between the pages, settled his
spectacles, and fixed his gaze intently upon the clergyman.
Standing in the pulpit he looked very large and fat ; the light
coming through the greenish unstained window-glass made his
face appear smooth and white like a very large egg.

He looked round at all the faces looking mildly up at him,
although some of them were the faces of men and women old
enough to be his grandparents, and gave out his text with
weighty significance. The argument of the sermon was that
visitors to this beautiful land, although they were on a holiday,
owed a duty to the natives. It did not, in truth, diflfer very
much from a leading article upon topics of general interest in
the weekly newspapers. It rambled with a kind of amiable
verbosity from one heading to another, suggesting that all hu-
man beings are very much the same under their skins, illus-
trating this by the resemblance of the games which little Span-
ish boys play to the games little boys in London streets play,
observing that very small things do influence people, particu-
larly natives ; in fact, a very dear friend of Mr. Bax's had told

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him that the success of our rule in India, that vast country,
largely depended upon the strict code of politeness which the
English adopted towards the natives, which led to the remark
that small things were not necessarily small, and that somehow
to the virtue of sympathy, which was a virtue never more
needed than to-day, when we lived in a time of experiment and
upheaval — witness the aeroplane and wireless telegraph, and
there were other problems which hardly presented themselves
to our fathers, but which no man who called himself a man
could leave unsettled. Here Mr. Bax became more definitely
clerical, and seemed to speak with a certain innocent craftiness,
as he pointed out that all this laid a special duty upon earnest
Christians. What men were inclined to say now was, "Oh,
that fellow — he's a parson." What we want them to say is,
"He's a good fellow" — ^in other words, "He is my brother."
He exhorted them to keep in touch with men of the modem
type; they must sympathise with their multifarious interests
in order to keep before their eyes that whatever discoveries
were made there was one discovery which could not be super-
seded, which was indeed as much of a necessity to the most
successful and most brilliant of them all as it had been to their
fathers. The humblest could help ; the least important things
had an influence (here his manner became definitely priestly
and his remarks seemed to be directed to women, for indeed
Mr. Bax's congregations were mainly composed of women, and
he was used to assigning them their duties in his innocent cleri-
cal campaigns). Leaving more definite instruction, he passed
on, and his theme broadened into a peroration for which he
drew a long breath and stood very upright, — ^"As a drop of
water, detached, alone, separate from others, falling from the
cloud and entering the great ocean, alters, so scientists tell us,
not only the immediate spot in the ocean where it falls, but all
the myriad drops which together compose the great universe of
waters, and by this means alters the configuration of the globe
and the lives of millions of sea creatures, and finally the lives
of the men and women who seek their living upon the shores
— as all this is within the compass of a single drop of water,
such as any rain shower sends in millions to lose themselves in
the earth, to lose themselves we say, but we know very well

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that ^he fruits of the earth could not flourish without them —
so is a marvel comparable to this within the reach of each
one of us, who dropping a little word or a little deed into the
great imiverse alters it; yea, it is a solemn thought, alters it,
for good or for evil, not for one instant, or in one vicinity, but
throughout the entire race, and for all eternity.'* Whipping
round as though to avoid applause, he continued with the same
breath, but in a different tone of voice, — "And now to God
the Father . . ."

He gave his blessing, and then, while the solemn chords again
issued from the harmonium behind the curtain, the different
people began scraping and fumbling and moving very awk-
wardly and consciously towards the door. Half-way upstairs,
at a point where the lights and sounds of the upper world
conflicted with the dimness and the dying hjrmn-ttme of the
under, Rachel felt a hand drop upon her shoulder.

"Miss Vinrace," Mrs. Flushing whispered peremptorily,
"stay to luncheon. It's such a dismal day. They don't even
give one beef for luncheon. Please stay."

Here they came out into the hall, where once more the little
band was greeted with curious respectful glances by the people
who had not gone to church, although their clothing made it
clear that they approved of Sunday to the very verge of going
to church. Rachel felt unable to stand any more of this par-
ticular atmosphere, and was about to say she must go back,
when Terence passed them, drawn along in talk with Evel)m
M. Rachel thereupon contented herself with saying that the
people looked very respectable, which negative remark Mrs.
Flushing interpreted to mean that she would stay.

"English people abroad !" she returned with a vivid flash of
malice. "Ain't they awful ! But we won't stay here," she con-
tinued, plucking at Rachel's arm. "Come up to my room."

She bore her past Hewet and Evel}^ and the Thomburys
and the Elliots. Hewet stepped forward.

"Luncheon " he began.

"Miss Vinrace has promised to lunch with me," said Mrs.
Flushing, and began to pound energetically up the staircase,
as though the middle classes of England were in pursuit. She

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did not stop until she had slammed her bedroom door behind
them.

"Well, what did you think of it?" she demanded, panting
slightly.

All the disgust and horror which Rachel had been accumu-
lating burst forth beyond her control.

"I thought it the most loathsome exhibition I'd ever seen!"
she broke out. "How can they — how dare they — what do they
mean by it — Mr. Bax, hospital nurses, old men, prostitutes,
disgusting "

She hit oflF the points she remembered as fast as she couW,
but she was too indignant to stop to analyse her feelings. Mrs.
Flushing watched her with keen gusto as she stood ejaculating
with emphatic movements of her head and hands in the middle
of the room.

"Go on, go on, do go on," she laughed, clapping her hands.
"It's delightful to hear you !"

"But why do you go ?" Rachel demanded.

"I've been every Sunday of my life ever since I can remem-
ber," Mrs. Flushing chuckled, as though that were a reason by
itself.

Rachel turned abruptly to the window. She did not know
now what it was that had put her into such a passion ; the sight
of Terence in the hall had confused her thoughts, leaving her
merely indignant. She looked straight at their own villa, half-
way up the side of the mountain. The most familiar view seen
framed through glass has a certain unfamiliar distinction, and
she grew calm as she gazed. Then she remembered that she
was in the presence of some one she did not know well, and she
hirned and looked at Mrs. Flushing. Mrs. Flushing was still
sitting on the edge of the bed, looking up, with her lips parted,
so that her strong white teeth showed in two rows.

"Tell me," she said, "which d'you like best, Mr. Hewet or
Mr. Hirst?"

"Mr. Hewet," Rachel replied, but her voice did not sound
natural.

"Which is the one who reads Greek in church ?" Mrs. Flush-
ing demanded.

It might have been either of them, and while Mrs. Flushing

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proceeded to describe them both, and to say that both frigh-
tened her, but one frightened her more than the other, Rachel
looked for a chair. The room, of course, was one of the larg-
est and most luxurious in the hotel. There were a great many-
arm-chairs and settees covered in brown holland, but each
of these was occupied by a large square piece of yellow card-
board, and all the pieces of cardboard were dotted or lined with
spots or dashes of bright oil paint.

"But you're not to look at those," said Mrs. Flushing as she
saw Rachel's eye wander. She jumped up, and turned as
many as she could, face downwards, upon the floor. Rachel,
however, managed to possess herself of one of them, and, with
the vanity of an artist, Mrs. Flushing demanded anxiously,
"Well, well?"

"It's a hill," Rachel replied. There could be no doubt that
Mrs. Flushing had represented the vigorous and abrupt fling
of the earth up into the air; you could almost see the clods
flying as it whirled.

Rachel passed from one to another. They were all marked
by something of the jerk and decision of their maker; they
were all perfectly untrained onslaughts of the brush upon some
half-realised idea suggested by hill or tree; and they were all
in some way characteristic of Mrs. Flushing.

"I see things movin'," Mrs. Flushing explained. "So" — she
swept her hand through a yard of the air. She then took up
one of the cardboards which Rachel had laid aside, seated her-
self on a stool, and began to flourish a stump of charcoal.
While she occupied herself in strokes which seemed to serve
her as speech serves others, Rachel, who was very restless,
looked about her.

"Open the wardrobe," said Mrs. Flushing after a pause,
speaking indistinctly because of a paint-brush in her mouth,
"and look at the things."

As Rachel hesitated, Mrs. Flushing came forward, still with
a paint-brush in her mouth, flung open the wings of her ward-
robe, and tossed a quantity of shawls, stuffs, cloaks, embroid-
eries, on to the bed. Rachel began to finger them. Mrs.
Flushing came up once more, and dropped a quantity of beads,
brooches, earrings, bracelets, tassels, and combs among the

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draperies. Then she went back to her stool and began to paint
in silence. The stuffs were coloured and dark and pale ; they
made a curious swarm of lines and colours upon the counter-
pane, with the reddish lumps of stone and peacocks' feathers
and clear pale tortoise-shell combs lying among them.

"The women wore them hundreds of years ago, they wear
'em still," Mrs. Flushing remarked. "My husband rides about
and finds 'em ; they don't know what they're worth, so we get
'em cheap. And we shall sell 'em to smart women in London,"
she chuckled, as though the thought of these ladies and their
absurd appearance amused her. After painting for some min-
utes, she suddenly laid down her brush and fixed her eyes upon
Rachel.

"I tell you what I want to do," she said. "I want to go up
there and see things for myself. It's silly stayin' here with a
pack of old maids as though we were at the seaside in Eng-
land. I want to go up the river and see the natives in their
camps. It's only a matter of ten days under canvas. My
husband's done it. One would lie out under the trees at night
and be towed down the river by day, and if we saw an)rthin'
nice we'd shout out and tell 'em to stop." She rose and began
piercing the bed again and again with a long golden pin, as she
watched to see what effect her suggestion had upon Rachel.

"We must make up a party," she went on. "Ten people
could hire a launch. Now you'll come, and Mrs. Ambrose'll
come, and will Mr. Hirst and t'other gentleman come ? Where's
a pencil ?"

She became more and more determined and excited as she
evolved her plan. She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote
down a list of surnames, which she invariably spelt wrong.
Rachel was enthusiastic, for indeed the idea was immeasurably
delightful to her. She had always had a great desire to see
the river, and the name of Terence threw a lustre over the
prospect, which made it almost too good to come true. She
did what she could to help Mrs. Flushing by suggesting names,
helping her to spell them, and counting up the days of the week
upon her fingers. As Mrs. Flushing wanted to know all she
could tell her about the birth and pursuits of every person she
suggested, and threw in wild stories of her own as to the tem-

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peraments and habits of artists, and people of the same name
who used to come to Chillingley in the old days, but were
doubtless not the same, though they too were very clever men
interested in Egyptology, the business took some time. At
last Mrs. Flushing sought her diary for help, the method of
reckoning dates on the fingers proving unsatisfactory. She
opened and shut every drawer in her writing-table, and then
cried furiously, "Yarmouth! Yarmouth! Drat the woman!
She's always out of the way when she's wanted !"

At this moment the luncheon gong began to work itself into
its midday frenzy. Mrs. Flushing rang her bell violently.
The door was opened by a handsome maid who was almost as
upright as her mistress.

"Oh, Yarmouth," said Mrs. Flushing, "just find iny diary
and see where ten days from now would bring us to, and ask
the hall porter how many men 'ud be wanted to row eight
people up the river for a week, and what it 'ud cost, and put
it on a slip of paper and leave it on my dressing-table. Now — "
she pointed at the door with a superb forefinger so that Rachel
had to lead the way.

"Oh, and Yarmouth," Mrs. Flushing called back over her
shoulder. "Put those things away and hang 'em in their right
places, there's a good girl, or it fusses Mr. Flushin'."

To all of which Yarmouth merely replied, "Yes, ma'am.**

As they entered the long dining-room it was obvious that the
day was still Sunday, although the mood was slightly abating.
The Flushings' table was set by the side in the window, so that
Mrs. Flushing could scrutinise each figure as it entered, and
her curiosity seemed to be intense.

"Old Mrs. Paley," she whispered as the wheeled chair slowly
made its way through the door, Arthur pushing behind.
"Thomburys" came next. "That nice woman," she nudged
Rachel to look at Miss Allan. "What's her name?" The
painted lady who always came in late, tripping into the room
with a prepared smile as though she came out upon a stage,
might well have quailed before Mrs. Flushing's stare, which
expressed her steely hostility to the whole tribe of painted
ladies. Next came the two young men whom Mrs. Flushing

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called colkctively the Hirsts. They sat down opposite, across
the gangway.

Mr. Flushing treated his wife with a mixture of admiration
and indulgence, making up by the suavity and fluency of his
speech for the abruptness of hers. While she darted and ejac-
ulated he gave Rachel a sketch of the history of South Ameri*
can art. He would deal with one of his wife's exclamations,
and then return as smoothly as ever to his theme. He knew
very well how to make a luncheon pass agreeably, without
being dull or intimate. He had formed the opinion, so he
told Rachel, that wonderful treasures lay hid in the depths
of the land; the things Rachel had seen were merely trifles
picked up in the course of one short journey. He thought
there might be giant gods hewn out of stone in the mountain-
side ; and colossal figures standing by themselves in the middle
of vast green pasture lands, where none but natives had ever
trod. Before the dawn of European art he believed that the
primitive huntsmen and priests had built temples of massive
stone slabs, had formed out of the dark rocks and the great
cedar trees majestic figures of gods and of beasts, and symbols
of the great forces, water, air, and forest among which they
lived. There might be prehistoric towns, like those in Greece
and Asia, standing in open places among the trees, filled with
the works of this early race. Nobody had been there ; scarcely
anything was known. Thus talking and displaying the most
picturesque of his theories, Rachel's attention was fixed upon
him.

She did not see that Hewet kept looking at her across the
gangway, between the figures of waiters hurrying past with
plates. He was inattentive, and Hirst was finding him also
very cross and disagreeable. They had touched upon all the
usual topics — upon politics and literature, gossip and Chris-
tianity. They had quarrelled over the service, which was every
bit as fine as Sappho, according to Hewet; so that Hirst's
paganism was mere ostentation. Why go to church, he de-
manded, merely in order to read Sappho ? Hirst observed that
he had listened to every word of the sermon, as he could prove
if Hewet would like a repetition of it; and he went to church
in order to realise the nature of his Creator, which he had done:

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very vividly that morning, thanks to Mr. Bax, who had in-
spired him to write three of the most superb lines in English
literature, an invocation to the Deity.

"I wrote 'em on the back of the envelope of my aunt's last
letter," he said, and pulled it from between the pages of
Sappho.

"Well, let's hear them," said Hewet, slightly mollified by the
prospect of a literary discussion.

"My dear Hewet, do you wish us both to be flung out of
^ the hotel by an enraged mob of Thomburys and Elliots ?" Hirst
enquired. "The merest whisper would be sufficient to in-
criminate me for ever. God !" he broke out, "what's the use of
attempting to write when the world's peopled by such damned
fools? Seriously, Hewet, I advise you to give up literature.
What's the good of it? There's your audience."

He nodded his head at the tables where a very miscellaneous
collection of Europeans were now engaged in eating, in some
cases in gnawing, the stringy foreign fowls. Hewet looked,
and grew more out of temper than ever. Hirst looked too.
His eyes fell upon Rachel, and he bowed to her.

"I rather think Rachel's in love with me," he remarked, as
his eyes returned to his plate. "That's the worst of friend-
ships with young women — they tend to fall in love with one."

To that Hewet made no answer whatever, and sat singularly
still. Hirst did not seem to mind getting no answer, for he
returned to Mr. Bax again, quoting the peroration about the
drop of water ; and when Hewet scarcely replied to these re-
marks either, he merely pursed his lips, chose a fig, and re-
lapsed quite contentedly into his own thoughts, of which he
always had a very large supply. When luncheon was over
they separated, taking their cups of coffee to different parts of
the hall.

From his chair beneath the palm-tree Hewet saw Rachel
come out of the dining-room with the Flushings ; he saw them
look round for chairs, and choose three in a comer where they
could go on talking in private. Mr. Flushing was now in the
full tide of his discourse. He produced a sheet of p^per upon
which he made drawings as he went on with his talk. He saw
Rachel lean over and look, pointing to this and that with her

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finger. Hewet unkindly compared Mr. Flushing, who was
extremely well dressed for a hot climate, and rather elaborate
in his manner, to a very persuasive shop-keeper. Meanwhile,
as he sat looking at them, he was entangled in the Thornburys
and Miss Allan, who, after hovering about for a minute or two,
settled in chairs round him, holding their cups in their hands.
They wanted to know whether he could tell them an)rthing
about Mr. Bax. Mr. Thombury as usual sat saying nothing,
looking vaguely ahead of him, occasionally raising his eye-
glasses, as if to put them on, but always thinking better of it
at the last moment, and letting them fall again. After some
discussion, the ladies put it beyond a doubt that Mr. Bax was
not the son of Mr. William Bax. There was a pause. Then
Mrs. Thornbury remarked that she was still in the habit of say-
mg Queen instead of King in the National Anthem. There
was another pause. Then Miss Allan observed reflectively
that going to church abroad always made her feel as if she had
been to a sailor's funeral. There was then a very long pause,,
which threatened to be final, when, mercifully, a bird about
the size of a magpie, but of a metallic blue colour, appeared on
the section of the terrace that could be seen from where they
sat. Mrs. Thornbury was led to enquire whether we should
like it if all our rooks were blue — ^''What do you think, Wil-
liam?" she asked, touching her husband on the knee.

"If all our rooks were blue," he said, — he raised his glasses ;
he actually placed them on his nose, — "they would not live long
in Wiltshire," he concluded ; he dropped his glasses to his sid^
again. The three elderly people now gazed meditatively at thd
bird, which was so obliging as to stay in the middle of the
view for a considerable space of time, thus making it unneces-
sary for them to speak again. Hewet began to wonder
whether he might not cross over to the Flushings' corner, when
Hirst appeared from the background, slipped into a chair by
Rachel's side, and began to talk to her with every appearance
of familiarity. Hewet could stand it no longer. He rose,
took his hat and dashed out of doors.

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CHAPTER XVIII

EVERYTHING he saw was distasteful to him. He hated
the blue and white, the intensity and definiteness, the hum
and heat of the south; the landscape seemed to him as hard
and as romantic as a cardboard background on the stage, and
the mountain but a wooden screen against a sheet painted blue.
He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.

Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one
branched off towards the Ambroses' villa, the other struck into
the country, eventually reaching a village on the plain, but
many footpaths, which had been stamped in the earth when it
was wet, led off from it, across great dry fields, to scattered
farmhouses, and the villas of rich natives. Hewet stepped
off the road on to one of these, in order to avoid the hardness
and heat of the main road, the dust of which was always being
raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which car-
ried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly
like a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead
and black wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.

The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irri-
tations of the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed
proved beyond a doubt that Rachel was indifferent to him, for
she had scarcely looked at him, and she had talked to Mr.
Flushing with just the same interest with which she talked
to him. Finally, Hirst's odious words flicked his mind like a
whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst
She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true,
as he said, that she was in love with him. He went over all
the evidence for this supposition — her sudden interest in Hirst's
writing, her way of quoting his opinions respectfully, or with
only half a laugh ; her very nickname for him, "the great Man,"
might have some serious meaning in it. Supposing that there
were an understanding between them, what would it <pean to
him?

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"Damn it all !" he demanded, "am I in love with her ?" To
that he could only return himself one answer. He certainly
was in love with her, if he knew what love meant. Ever since
he had first seen her he had been interested and attracted, more
and more interested and attracted, until he was scarcely able
to think of anything except Rachel. But just as he was sliding
into one of the long feasts of meditation about them both, he
checked himself by asking whether he wanted to marry her?
That was the real problem, for these miseries and agonies could
not be endured, and it was necessary that he should make up his
mind. He instantly decided that he did not want to marry
any one. Partly because he was irritated by Rachel the idea of
marriage irritated him also. It immediately suggested the pic-
ture of two people sitting alone over the fire; the man was
reading, the woman sewing. There was a second picture. He
saw a man jump up, say good-night, leave the company and
hasten away with the quiet secret look of one who is stealing
to certain happiness. Both these pictures were very unpleas-
ant, and even more so was a third picture, of husband and wife
and friend ; and the married people glancing at each other as
though they were content to let something pass unquestioned,
being themselves possessed of the deeper truth. Other pic-
tures — he was walking very fast in his irritation, and they came
before him without any conscious effort, like pictures on a sheet
— succeeded these. Here were the worn husband and wife
sitting with their children round them, very patient, tolerant,
and wise. But that, too, was an unpleasant picture. He tried
all sorts of pictures, taking them from the lives of friends of
his, for he knew many different married couples ; but he saw
them always, walled up in a warm firelit room. When, on the
other hand, he began to think of unmarried people, he saw
them active in an unlimited world ; above all, standing on the
same ground as the rest, without shelter or advantage. All
the most individual and humane of his friends were bachelors
and spinsters ; indeed he was surprised to find that the women
he most admired and knew best were unmarried women. Mar-
riage seemed to be worse for them than it was for men. Leav-
ing these general pictures he considered the people whom he
had been observing lately at the hotel. He had often revolved

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these questions in his mind, as he watched Susan and Arthur,
or Mr. and Mrs. Thombury, or Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. He had
observed how the shy happiness and surprise of the engaged
couple had gradually been replaced by a comfortable, tolerant
state of mind, as if they had already done with the adventure
of intimacy and were taking up their parts. Susan used to
pursue Arthur about with a sweater, because he had one day
let slip that a brother of his had died of pneumonia. The
sight amused him, but was not pleasant if you substituted
Terence and Rachel for Arthur and Susan ; and Arthur was
far less eager to get you in a corner and talk about flying and
the mechanics of aeroplanes. They would settle down. He
then looked at the couples who had been married for several
years. It was true that Mrs. Thornbury had a husband, and
that for the most part she was wonderfully successful in bring-
ing him into the conversation, but one could not imagine what
they said to each other when they were alone. There was the
same difficulty with regard to the Elliots, except that they prob-
ably bickered openly in private. They sometimes bickered in
public, though these disagreements were painfully covered over
by little insincerities on the part of the wife, who was afraid of
public opinion, because she was much stupider than her hus-
band, and had to make efforts to keep hold of him. There
could be no doubt, he decided, that it would have been far
better for the world if these couples had separated. Even
the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected prof oimdly^-
in spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage
coo a compromise ? She gave way to him ; she spoilt him ; she
arranged things for him ; she who was all truth to others was
not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they
came in conflict with her husband. It was a strange and pit-
eous flaw in her nature. Perhaps Rachel had been right, then,
when she said that night in the garden, "We bring out what's
worst in each other — ^we should live separate/*

No, Rachel had been utterly wrong! Every argument
seemed to be against undertaking the burden of marriage until
tie came to Rachel's argument, which was manifestly absurd.
From having been the pursued, he turned and became the pur-
suer. Allowing the case against marriage to lapse, he began

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to consider the peculiarities of character which had led to her
sa3ring that. Had she meant it? Surely one ought to know
the character of the person with whom one might spend all
one's life; being a novelist, let him try to discover what sort of
person she was. When he was with her he could not analyse
her qualities, because he seemed to know them instinctively, but
when he was away from her it sometimes seemed to him that
he did not know her at all. She was young, but she was also
old ; she had little self-confidence, and yet she was a good judge
of people. She was happy; but what made her happy? If
they were alone and the excitement had worn off, and they
had to deal with the ordinary facts of the day, what would
happen? Casting his eye upon his own character, two things
appeared certain to him: that he was very unpunctual, and
that he disliked answering notes. As far as he knew Rachel
was inclined to be punctual, but he could not remember that he
had ever seen her with a pen in her hand. Let him next imag-
ine a dinner-party, say at the Crooms, and Wilson, who had
taken her down, talking about the state of the Liberal party.
She would say — of course she was absolutely ignorant of poli-
tics. Nevertheless she was intelligent certainly, and honest,
too. Her temper was uncertain — ^that he had noticed — ^and
she was not domestic, and she was not easy, and she was not
quiet, or beautiful, except in some dresses in some lights. But
the great gift she had was that she understood what was said
to her ; there had never been any one like her for talking to.
You could say an)rthing — ^you could say everything, and yet she
was never servile. Here he pulled himself up, for it seemed to
him suddenly that he knew less about her than about any one.
All these thoughts had occurred to him many times already;
often had he tried to argue and reason; and again he had
reached the old state of doubt. H^ did not know her, and he
did not know what she felt, or whether they could live to-
gether, or whether he wanted to marry her, and yet he was in
^ve with her.

Supposing he went to her and said (he slackened his pace
and began to speak aloud, as if he were speaking to Rachel) :

"I worship you, but I loathe marriage, I hate its smugness, its

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safety, its compromise, and the thought of you interfering in
my work, hindering me ; what would you answer ?"

He stopped, leant against the trunk of a tree, and gazed
without seeing them at some stones scattered on the bank of
the dry river-bed. He saw Rachel's face distinctly, the g^ey
eyes, the hair, the mouth; the face that could look so many
things — ^plain, vacant, almost insignificant, or wild,^ passionate,
almost beautiful, yet in his eyes was always the same because
of the extraordinary freedom with which she looked at him,
and spoke as she felt. What would she answer ? What did she
feel ? Did she love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him
or for any other man, being, as she had said the other after-
noon, free, like the wind or the sea ? '

"Oh, you're free !" he exclaimed, in exultation at the thought
of her, "and I'd keep you free. We'd be free together. We'd
share everything together. No happiness would be like ours.
No lives would compare with ours." He opened his arms
wide as if to hold her and the world in one embrace.

No longer able to consider marriage, or to weigh coolly what
her nature was, or how it would be if they lived together, he
dropped to the ground and sat absorbed in the thought of her,
and soon tormented by the desire to be in her presence again.

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CHAPTER XIX

BUT Hewet need not have increased his torments by imagin-
ing that Hirst was still talking to Rachel. The party very
soon broke up, the Flushings going in one direction, Hirst in
another, and Rachel remaining in the hall, pulling the illus-
trated papers about, turning from one to another, her move-
ments expressing the unformed restless desire in her mind.
She did not know whether to go or to stay, though Mrs. Flush-
ing had commanded her to appear at tea. The hall was empty,
save for Miss Willett who was playing scales with her fingers
upon a sheet of sacred music, and the Carters, an opulent
couple who disliked the girl, because her shoe laces were un-
tied, and she did not look sufficiently cheery, which by some
indirect process of thought led them to think that she would
not like them. Rachel certainly would not have liked them, if
she had seen them, for the excellent reason that Mr. Carter
waxed his moustache, and Mrs. Carter wore bracelets, and they
were evidently the kind of people who would not like her ; but
she was too much absorbed by her own restlessness to think
or to look.

She was turning over the slippery pages of an American
magazine, when the hall door swung, a wedge of light fell upon
the floor, and a small white figure upon whom the light seemed
focussed, made straight across the room to her.

"What! You here?" Evelyn exclaimed. "Just caught a
glimpse of you at lunch ; but you wouldn't condescend to lode
at me''

It was part of Evelyn's character that in spite of many snubs
which she received or imagined, she never gave up the pursuit
of people she wanted to know, and in the long run generally
succeeded in knowing them and even in making them like her.

She looked round her. "I hate this place. I hate these peo-
ple," she said. "I wish you'd come up to my room with me,
I do want to talk to you."

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As Rachel had no wish to go or to stay, Evdyn took her by
the wrist and drew her out of the hall and up the stairs. As
they went upstairs two steps at a time, Evelyn, who still kept
hold of Rachel's hand, ejaculated broken sentences about not
caring a hang what people said. "Why should one, if one
knows one's nght ? And let 'em all go to blazes ! Them's my
opinions !"

She was in a state of great excitement, and the muscles of
her arms were twitching nervously. It was evident that she
was only waiting for the door to shut to tell Rachel all about
it. Indeed, directly they were inside her room, she sat on the
end of the bed and said, "I suppose you think I'm mad?"

Rachel was not in the mood to think dearly about any one's
state of mind. She was however in the mood to say straight
out whatever occurred to her without fear of the consequences.

"Somebody's proposed to you," she remarked.

"How on earth did you guess that?" Evelyn exclaimed, some
pleasure mingling with her surprise. "Do I look as if I'd
just had a proposal?"

"You look as if you had them every day," Rachd replied.

"But I don't suppose I've had more than you've had," Eve-
lyn laughed rather insincerely.

"I've never had one."

"But you will — ^lots — ^it's the easiest thing in the world —
But that's not what's happened this afternoon exactly. It's —
Oh, it's a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle !"

She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks
with cold water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging
them and trembling slightly she turned and explained in the
high pitched voice of nervous exdtement: "Alfred Perrott
says I've promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sin-
clair says he'll shoot himself if I don't marry him, and I say,
*Well, shoot yourself !' But of course he doesn't — ^they never
do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began
bothering me to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting
with Alfred Perrott, and told me I'd no heart, and was merely
a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant things like that. So at
last I said to him, 'Well, Sinclair, you've said enough now.
you can just let me go.' And then he caught me and kissed

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me — ^the disgusting brute — I can still feel his nasty hairy face
just there — as if he'd any right to, after what he'd said !"

She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.

"I've never met a man that was fit to compare with a
woman 1" she cried; "they've no dignity, they've no courage,
they've nothing but their beastly passions and their brute
strength! Would any woman have behaved like that — if a
man had said he didn't want her? We've too much self-
respect ; we're infinitely finer than they are."

She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a
towel. Tears were now running down together with the drops
of cold water.

"It makes me angry," she explained, dr3ring her eyes.

Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evel)m's po-
sition ; she only thought that the world was full of people in
torment.

"There's only one man here I really like," Kvtlyn continued ;
"Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him."

At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her
heart seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.

"Why?" she asked. "Why can you trust him?"

"I don't know," said Evelyn. "Don't you have feelings
about people? Feelings you're absolutely certain are right?
I had a long talk with Terence the other night. I felt we
really were friends after that. There's something of a woman
in him — " She paused as though she were thinking of very
intimate things that Terence had told her, or so at least Rachel
interpreted her gaze.

She tried to force herself to say, "Has he proposed to you?"
but the question was too tremendous, and in another moment
E^velyn was saying that the finest men were like women, and
women were nobler than men — for example, one couldn't imag-
ine a woman like Lillah Harrison thinking a mean thing or
having an)rthing base about her.

"How I'd like you to know her !" she exclaimed.

She was becoming much calmer, and her cheeks were now
quite dry. Her eyes had regained their usual expression of
keen vitality, and she seemed to have forgotten Alfred and
Sinclair and her emotion.

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"LiUah runs a home for inebriate women in the Deptford
Road," she continued; "She started it, managed it, did every-
thing off her own bat, and it's now the biggest of its kind in
England. You can't think what those women are like — ^and
their homes. But she goes among them at all hours of the day
and night. I've often been with her. . . . That's what's the
matter with us. . . . We don't do things. What do you dof*
she demanded, looking at Rachel with a slightly ironical smile.
Rachel had scarcely listened to any of this, and her expres-
sion was vacant and unhappy. She had conceived an equal
dislike for Lillah Harrison and her work in the Deptford Road,
and for Evelyn M. and her profusion of love affairs.

"I play," she said with an affectation of stolid composure.

"That's about it !" Evelyn laughed. "We none of us do any-
thing but play. And that's why women like Lillah Harrison,
who's worth twenty of you and me, have to work themselves
to the bone. But I'm tired of playing," she went on, lying flat
on the bed, and raising her arms above her head. Thus
stretched out, she looked more diminutive than ever.

"I'm going to do something. I've got a splendid idea. Look
here, you must join. I'm sure you've got atiy amount of stuff
in you, though you look — ^well, as if you'd lived all your life
in a garden." She sat up, and began to expfein with anima-
tion. "I belong to a club in London. It meett\ every Satur-
day, so it's called the Saturday Club. We're supposed to talk
about art, but I'm sick of talking about art — what's the good
of it ? With all kinds of real things going on round one ? It
isn't as if they'd got an)rthing to say about art, either. So
what I'm going to tell 'em is that we've talked enougli about
art, and we'd better talk about life for a change. Quef^tions
that really matter to people's lives, the White Slave TrWfic,
Woman Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And wT^en
we've made up our mind what we want to do we could f oirm
ourselves into a society for doing it. . . . I'm certain thati if
people like ourselves were to take things in hand instead* of
leaving it to policemen and magistrates, we could put a stopUo
— ^prostitution" — she lowered her voice at the ugly word — Tin
six months. My idea is that men and women ought to join in
these matters. We ought to go into Piccadilly and stop one ci

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these poor wretches and say : 'Now, look here, I'm no better
than you are, and I don't pretend to be any better, but you're
doing what you know to be beastly, and I won't have you doing
beastly things, because we're all the same under our skins, and
if you do a beastly thing it does matter to me/ That's what
Mr. Bax was saying this morning, and it's true, though you
clever people — ^you're clever too, aren't you ? — don't believe it."

When Evelyn began talking — it was a fact she often regret-
ted — her thoughts came so quickly that she never had any time
to listen to other people's thoughts. She continued without
more pause than was needed for taking breath.

"I don't see why the Saturday club people shouldn't do a
really great work in that way," she went on. "Of course it
would want organisation, some one to give their life to it, but
I'm ready to do that. My notion's to think of the human be-
ings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.
What's wrong with Lillah — if there is an)rthing wrong — is that
she thinks of Temperance first and the women afterwards.
Now there's one thing I'll say to my credit," she continued;
"I'm not intellectual or artistic or anything of that sort, but
I'm jolly human." She slipped off the bed and sat on the floor,
looking up at Rachel. She searched up into her face as if she
were trying to read what kind of character was concealed
behind the face. She put her hand on Rachel's knee.

"It is being hiunan that counts, isn't it?" she continued.
"Being real, whatever Mr. Hirst may say. Are you real ?"

Rachel felt much as Terence had felt that Evelyn was too
close to her, and that there was something exciting in this
closeness, although it was also disagreeable. She was spared
the need of finding an answer to the question, for Evelyn pro-
ceeded, "Do you believe in an)rthing?"

In order to put an end to the scrutiny of these bright blue
eyes, and to reheve her own physical restlessness, Rachel
pushed back her chair and exclaimed, "In everything!" and
began to finger different objects, the books on the table, the
photographs, the fleshly leaved plant with the stiff bristles,
which stood in a large earthenware pot in the window.

"I believe in the bed, in the photographs, in the pot, in the
balcony, in the sun, in Mrs. Flushing," she remarked, still

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speaking recklessly, with something at the back of her mind
forcing her to say the things that one usually does not say,
"But I don't believe in God, I don't believe in Mr. Bax, I don't
believe in the hospital nurse. I don't believe — ^" She took up
a photograph and, looking at it, did not finish her sentence.

"That's my mother," said Evel)m, who remained sitting on
the floor binding her knees together with her arms, and watch-
ing Rachel curiously.

Rachel considered the portait. "Well, I don't much believe
in her," she remarked after a time in a low tone of voice.

Mrs. Murgatroyd looked indeed as if the life had been
crushed out of her ; she knelt on a chair, gazing piteously from
behind the body of a Pomeranian dog which she clasped to her
cheek, as if for protection.

"And that's my dad," said Evel3m, for there were two photo-
graphs in one frame. The second photograph represented a
handsome soldier with high regular features and a heavy black
moustache ; his hand rested on the hilt of his sword ; there was
a decided likeness between him and Evelyn.

"And it's because of them," said Evel3m, "that I'm going to
help the other women. You've heard about me, I suppose?
They weren't married, you see ; I'm not anybody in particular.
I'm not a bit ashamed of it. They loved each other anyhow,
and that's more than most people can say of their parents."

Rachel sat down on the bed, with the two pictures in her
hands, and compared them — ^the man and the woman who had,
so Evelyn said, loved each other. That fact interested her
more than the campaign on behalf of unfortimate women which
Evel}^! was once more beginning to describe. She looked
again from one to the other.

"What d'you think it's like," she asked, as Evel)m paused
for a minute, "being in love ?"

"Have you never been in love?" Evelyn asked. "Oh no —
one's only got to look at you to see that," she added. She con-
sidered. "I really was in love once," she said. She fell into
reflection, her eyes losing their bright vitality and approach-
ing something like an expression of tenderness. "It was heav-
enly! — ^while it lasted. The worst of it is it don't last, not
with me. That's the bother."

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She went on to consider the difficulty with Alfred and Sin-
clair about which she had pretended to ask Rachel's advice.
But she did not want advice ; she wanted intimacy. When she
looked at Rachel, who was still looking at the photographs on
the bed, she could not help seeing that Rachel was not think-
ing about her. What was she thinking about, then? Evelyn
was tormented by the little spark of life in her which was al-
ways trying to work through to other people, and was always
being rebuffed. Falling silent she looked at her visitor, her
shoes, her stockings, the combs in her hair, all the details of
her dress in short, as though by seizing every detail she might
get closer to the life within.

Rachel at last put down the photographs, walked to the win-
dow and remarked, "It's odd. People talk as much about love
as they do about religion."

"I wish you'd sit down and talk," said Evelyn impatiently.

Instead Rachel opened the window, which was made in two
long panes, and looked down into the garden below.

"That's where we got lost the first night," she said. "It
must have been in those bushes."

"They kill hens down there," said Evelyn. "They cut their
heads off with a knife — disgusting! But tell me — ^what "

"I'd like to explore the hotel," Rachel interrupted. She
drew her head in and looked at Evelyn, who still sat on the
floor.

"It's just like other hotels," said Evelyn.

*rhat might be, although every room and passage and chair
in the place had a character of its own in Rachel's eyes ; but
she could not bring herself to stay in one place any longer.
She moved slowly towards the door.

"What is it you want?" said Evelyn. "You make me feel
as if you were always thinking of something you don't say.
. . . Do say it!"

But Rachel made no response to this invitation either. She
stopped with her fingers on the handle of the door, as if she
remembered that some sort of pronouncement was due from
her.

"I suppose you'll marry one of them," she said, and then
turned the handle and shut the door behind her. She walked

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slowly down the passage, running her hand along the wall be-
side her. She did not think which way she was going, and
therefore walked down a passage which only led to a window
and a balcony. She looked down at the kitchen premises, the
wrong side of hotel life, which was cut off from the right side
by a maze of small bushes. The ground was bare, old tins
were scattered about, and the bushes wore towels and aprons
upon their heads to dry. Every now and then a waiter came
out in a white apron and threw rubbish on to a heap. Two
large women in cotton dresses were sitting on a bench with
blood-smeared tin trays in front of them and yellow bodies
across their knees. They were plucking the birds, and talking
as they plucked. Suddenly a chicken came floundering, half
flying, half running into the space, pursued by a third woman
whose age could hardly be under eighty. Although wizened
and unsteady on her legs she kept up the chase, egged on by
the laughter of the others ; her face was expressive of furious
rage, and as she ran she swore in Spanish. Frightened by
hand-clapping here, a napkin there,, the bird ran this way and
that in sharp angles, and finally fluttered straight at the old
woman, who opened her scanty grey skirts to enclose it,
dropped upon it in a bundle, and then, holding it out, cut its
head off with an expression of vindictive energy and triumph
<:ombined. The blood and the ugly wriggling fascinated
Rachel, so that although she knew that some one had*come up
behind and was standing beside her, she did not turn round
until the old woman had settled down on the bench beside the
others. Then she looked up sharply, because of the ugliness
of what she had seen. It was Miss Allan who stood beside her.

"Not a pretty sight," said Miss Allan, "although I daresay
it's really more humane than our method. ... I don't believe
you've ever been in my room," she added, and turned away as
if she meant Rachel to follow her. Rachel followed, for it
seemed possible that each new person might remove the mys-
tery which burdened her.

The bedrooms at the hotel were all on the same pattern, save
that some were larger and some smaller; each had a floor of
dark red tile; each had a high bed, draped in mosquito cur-
tains; each had a writing-table and a dressing-ftable, and a

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couple of arm-chairs. But directly a box was unpacked the
rooms became very different, so that Miss Allan's room was
very unlike Evelyn's room. There were no variously coloured
hatpins on her dressing-table; no scent-bottles; no narrow
curved pairs of scissors ; no great variety of shoes and boots ;
no silk petticoats lying on the chairs. The room was extremely
neat. There seemed to be two pairs of everything. The
writing-table, however, was piled with manuscript, and a table
was drawn out to stand by the arm-chair on which were two
separate heaps of dark library books, in which there were many
slips of paper sticking out at different degrees of thickness.
Miss Allan had asked Rachel to come in out of kindness, think-
ing that she was waiting about with nothing to do. Moreover,
she liked young women, for she had taught many of them, and
having received so much hospitality from the Ambroses she
was glad to be able to repay a minute part of it. She looked
about accordingly for something to show her. The room did
not provide much entertainment. She touched her manuscript.
"Age of Chaucer; Age of Elizabeth; Age of Dryden," she re-
flected; "I'm glad there aren't many more ages. I'm still in
the middle of the eighteenth century. Won't you sit down,
Miss Vinrace? The chair, though small, is firm. . . . Eu-
phues. The germ of the English novel," she continued, glanc-
ing at another page. "Is that the kind of thing that interests
you?"

She looked at Rachel with great kindness and simplicity, as
though she would do her utmost to provide anything she wished
to have. This expression had a remarkable charm in a face
otherwise much lined with care and thought.

"Oh no, it's music with you, isn't it?" she continued, recol-
lecting, "and I generally find that they don't go together.
Sometimes of course we have prodigies — " She was looking
about her for something and now saw a jar on the mantelpiece
which she reached down and gave to Rachel. "If you put your
finger into this jar you may be able to extract a piece of pre-
served ginger. Are you a prodigy?"

But the ginger was deep and could not be reached.

"Don't bother," she said, as Miss Allan looked about for

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some other implement "I daresay I shouldn't like preserved
ginger."

"You've never tried ?" enquired Miss Allan. "Then I con-
sider that it is your duty to try now. Why, you may add a
new pleasure to life, and as you are still young — " She won-
dered whether a button-hook would do. "I make it a rule to
try ever)rthing," she said. "Don't you think it would be very
anno)ring if you tasted ginger for the first time on your death-
bed, and found you never liked anything so much? I should
be so exceedingly annoyed that I think I should get well on that
account alone."

She was now successful, and a lump of ginger emerged on
the end of the button-hook. While she went to wipe the but-
ton-hook, Rachel bit the ginger and at once cried, "I must spit
it out!"

"Are you ^ure you have really tasted it?" Miss Allan de-
manded.

For answer Rachel threw it out of the window.

"An experience anyhow," said Miss Allan calmly. "Let me
see — I have nothing else to offer you, unless you would like to
taste this." A small cupboard hung above her bed, and she
took out of it a slim elegant jar filled with a bright green fluid.

"Creme de Menthe," she said. "Liqueur, you know. It
looks as if I drank, doesn't it ? As a matter of fact it goes to
prove what an exceptionally abstemious person I am. I've
had that jar for six-and-twenty years," she added, looking at
it with pride, as she tipped it over, and from the height of the
liquid it could be seen that the bottle was still untouched.

"Twenty-six years ?" Rachel exclaimed.

Miss Allan was gratified, for she had meant Rachel to be
surprised.

"When I went to Dresden six-and-twenty years ago," she.
said, "a certain friend of mine announced her intention of mak-
ing me a present. She thought that in the event of shipwreck
or accident a stimulant might be useful. However, as I had
no occasion for it, I gave it back on my return. On the eve of
any foreign journey the same bottle always makes its appear-
ance, with the same note ; on my return in safety it is always
handed back. I consider it a kind of charm against accidents.

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Though I was once detained twenty-four hours by an accident
to the train in front of me, I have never met with any accident
myself. Yes," she continued, now addressing the bottle, "we
have seen many climes and cupboards together, have we not ?
I intend one of these days to have a silver label made with an
inscription. It is a gentleman, as you may observe, and his
name is Oliver. ... I do not think I could forgive you. Miss
Vinrace, if you broke my Oliver," she said, firmly taking the
bottle out of Rachel's hands and replacing it in the cupboard.

Rachel was swinging the bottle by the neck. She was in-
terested by Miss Allan to the point of forgetting the bottle.

"Well," she exclaimed, "I do think that odd ; to have had a
friend for twenty-six years, and a bottle, and — to have made
all those journeys."

"Not at all ; I call it the reverse of odd," Miss Allan replied.
"I always consider myself the most ordinary person I know.
It's rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget —
are you a prodigy, or did you say you were not a prodigy ?"

She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have
known and experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously
about the room, that surely there must be balm for all anguish
in her words, could one induce her to have recourse to them.
But Miss Allan, who was now locking the cupboard door,
showed no signs of breaking the reticence which had snowed
her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel
silent ; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a
spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived
there was nothing to be done but to drift past each other in
silence.

"I'm not a prpdigy. I find it very difficult to say what I
mean— ^" she observed at length.

"It's a matter of temperament, I believe," Miss Allan helped
her. "There are some people who have no difl5culty; for my-
self I find there are a great many things I simply cannot say.
But then I consider myself very slow. One of my colleagues,
now, knows whether she likes you or not — let me see, how does
she do it? — ^by the way you say good-morning at breakfast.
It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my
mind. But most young people seem to find it easy ?"

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*'Oh no," said Rachel. "It's hard !"

Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she
suspected that there were difficulties of some kind. Then she
put her hand to the back of her head, and discovered that one
of the grey coils of hair had come loose.

"I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me," she said,
rising, "if I do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory
type of hairpin. I must change my dress, too, for the matter
of that; and I should be particularly glad of your assistance,
because there is a tiresome set of hooks which I can fasten for
myself, but it takes from ten to fifteen minutes ; whereas with
your help "

She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood do-
ing her hair before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petti-
coat being so short that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey
legs.

"People say youth is pleasant ; I myself find middle age far
pleasanter," she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and
taking up her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came
down to her neck.

"When one was young," she continued, "things could seem
so very serious if one was made that way. . . . And now my
dress."

In a wonderfully short space of time her hair had been re-
formed in its usual loops. The upper half of her body now
became dark green with black stripes on it ; the skirt, however,
needed hooking at various angles, and Rachel had to kneel oo
the floor, fitting the eyes to the hooks.

"Our Miss Johnson used to find life very unsatisfactory, I
remember," Miss Allan continued. She turned her back to
the light. "And then she took to breeding guinea-pigs f(^r
their spots, and became absorbed in that. I have just heard
that the yellow guinea-pig has had a black baby. We had a bet
of sixpence on about it. She will be very triumphant."

The skirt was fastened. She looked at herself in the glass
with the curious stiffening of her face generally caused by
looking in the glass.

"Am I in a fit state to encounter my fellow-beings?" she
asked. "I forget which way it is — ^but they find black animals

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very rarely have coloured babies — it may be the other way
round. I have had it so often explained to me that it is very
stupid of me to have forgotten again."

She moved about the room acquiring small objects with quiet
force, and fixing them about her — 2l locket, a watch and chain,
a heavy gold bracelet, and the parti-coloured button of a suf-
frage society. Finally, completely equipped for Sunday tea,
she stood before Rachel, and smiled at her kindly. She was
not an impulsive woman, and her life had schooled her to re-
strain her tongue. At the same time, she was possessed of an
amount of good-will towards others, and in particular towards
the young, which often made her regret that speech was so
difficult.

"Shall we descend ?'* she said.

She put one hand upon Rachel's shoulder, and stooping,
picked up a pair of walking-shoes with the other, and placed
them neatly side by side outside her door. As they walked
down the passage they passed many pairs of boots and shoes,
some black and some brown, all side by side, and all different,
even to the way in which they lay together.

"I always think that people are so like their boots," said Miss
Allan. "That is Mrs. Paley's — " but as she spoke the door
opened, and Mrs. Paley rolled out in her chair, equipped also
for tea.

She greeted Miss Allan and Rachel.

"I was just saying that people are so like their boots," said
Miss Allan. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it more
loudly still. Mrs. Paley did not hear. She repeated it a third
time. Mrs. Paley heard, but she did not understand. She was
apparently about to repeat it for the fourth time, when Rachel
suddenly said something inarticulate, and disappeared down
the corridor. This misunderstanding, which involved a com-
plete block in the passage, seemed to her unbearable. She
walked quickly and blindly in the opposite direction, and found
herself at the end of a cul de sac. There was a window, and a
table and a chair in the window, and upon the table stood a
rusty inkstand, an ash-tray, an old copy of a French news-
paper, and a pen with a broken nib. Rachel sat down, as if
to study the French newspaper, but a tear fell on the blurred

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French print, raising a soft blot. She lifted her head sharply,
exclaiming aloud, "It's intolerable !" Looking out of the wiii-
dow with eyes that would have seen nothing even had they
not been dazed by tears, she indulged herself at last in violent
abuse of the entire day. It had been miserable from start
to finish ; first, the service in the chapel ; then luncheon ; then
Evelyn; then Miss Allan; then old Mrs. Paley blocking up the
passage. All day long she had been tantalized and put off.
She had now reached one of those eminences, the result of
some crisis, from which the world is finally displayed in its true
proportions. She disliked the look of it immens^y — churches,
politicians, misfits, and huge impostures — ^men like Mr. Dallo-
way, men like Mr. Bax, Evelyn and her chatter, Mrs. Paley
blocking up the passage. Meanwhile the steady beat of her
own pulse represented the hot current of feeling that ran down
beneath ; beating, struggling, fretting. For the time, her own
body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to
burst forth here — ^there — and was repressed now by Mr. Bax,
now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity
— ^the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would
twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people
stupid. Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the
garden beneath she represented them as aimless masses of mat-
ter, floating hither and thither, without aim except to impede
her. What were they doing, those other people in the world ?

"Nobody knows," she said. The force of her rage was be-
ginning to spend itself, and the vision of the world which had
been so vivid became dim.

"It's a dream," she murmured. She considered the rusty
inkstand, the pen, the ash-tray, and the old French newspaper.
These small and worthless objects seemed to her to represent
human lives.

"We're asleep and dreaming," she repeated. But the pos-
sibility which now suggested itself that one of the shapes might
be the shape of Terence roused her from her melancholy leth-
argy. She became as restless as she had been before she sat
down. She was no longer able to see the world as a town laid
out beneath her. It was covered instead by a haze of feverish
red mist. She had returned to the state in which she had been

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all day. Thinking was no escape. Physical movement was
the only refuge, in and out of rooms, in and out of peoples'
minds, seeking she knew not what. Therefore she rose, pushed
back the table, and went downstairs. She went out of the hall
door, and, turning the comer of the hotel, found herself among
the people whom she had seen from the window. But owing
to the broad sunshine after shaded passages, and to the sub-
stance of living people after dreams, the group appeared with
startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled
oflF everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had
the look of a vision printed on the dark at night. White and
grey and purple figures were scattered on the green; round
wicker tables ; in the middle the flame of the tea-urn made the
air waver like a faulty sheet of glass; a massive green tree
stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest. As
she approached, she could hear Evelyn's voice repeating monot-
onously, "Here then — here — good doggie, come here;" for a
moment nothing seemed to happen; it all stood. still, and then
she realised that one of the figures was Helen Ambrose; and
the dust again began to settle.

The group indeed had come together in a miscellaneous
way ; one tea-table joining to another tea-table, and deck-chairs
serving to connect two groups. But even at a distance it could
be seen that Mrs. Flushing, upright and imperious, dominated
the party. She was talking vehemently to Helen across the
table.

"Ten days under canvas," she was saying. "No comforts.
If you want comforts, don't come. But I may tell you, if you
don't come you'll regret it all your life. You say yes ?"

At this moment Mrs. Flushing caught sight of Rachel.

"Ah, there's your niece. She's promised. You're coming,
aren't you?" Having adopted the plan, she pursued it with
the energy of a child.

Rachel took her part with eagerness.

"Of course I'm coming. So are you, Helen. And Mr. Pep-
per too." As she sat down she realised that she was sur-
rounded by men and women she knew, but that Terence was
not among them. From various angles people began saying
what they thought of the proposed expedition. According to

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some it would be hot, but the nights would be cold ; according
to others, the difficulties would lie rather in getting a boat, and
in speaking the language. Mrs. Flushing disposed of all ob-
jections, whether due to man or due to nature, by announcing
that her husband would settle all that.

I Meanwhile Mr. Flushing quietly explained to Helen that the
expedition was really a simple matter ; it took five days at the
outside; and the place — a native village — was certainly well
worth seeing before she returned to England. Helen mur-
mured ambiguously, and did not commit herself to one answer
rather than to another.

The tea-party, however, included too many different kinds of
people for general conversation to flourish ; and from Rachel's
point of view possessed the great advantage that it was quite
unnecessary for her to talk. Over there Susan and Arthur
were explaining to Mrs. Paley that an expedition had been
proposed; and Mrs. Paley having grasped the fact, gave the
advice of an old traveller that they should take nice canned
vegetables, fur cloaks, and insect powder. She leant over to
Mrs. Flushing and whispered something which from the
twinkle in her eyes probably had reference to bugs. Then
Helen was reciting "Toll for the Brave" to St. John Hirst, in
order apparently to win a sixpence which lay upon the table;
while Mr. Hughling Elliot imposed silence upon his section of
the audience by his fascinating anecdote of Lord Curzon and
the undergraduate's bicycle. Mrs. Thornbury was trying to
remember the name of a man who might have been another
Garibaldi, and had written a book which they ought to read;
and Mr. Thornbury recollected that he had a pair of binoculars
at anybody's service. Miss Allan meanwhile murmured with
the curious intimacy which a spinster often achieves with dogs,
to the fox-terrier which Evelyn had at last induced to come
over to them. Little particles of dust or blossom fell on the
plates now and then when the branches sighed above. Rachel
seemed to see and hear a little of everything, much as a river
feels the twigs that fall into it and sees the sky above, but her
eyes were too vague for Evelyn's liking. She came across,
and sat on the ground at Rachel's feet.

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"Well," she asked suddenly, "what are you thinking about ?"

"Miss Warrington," Rachel replied rashly, because she had
to say something. She did indeed see Susan murmuring to
Mrs. Elliot, while Arthur stared at her with complete confi-
dence in his own love. Both Rachel and Evel)m then began
to listen to what Susan was saying.

"There's the ordering and the dogs and the garden, and the
children coming to be taught," her voice proceeded rhyth-
mically as if checking the list, "and my tennis, and the village,
and letters to write for father, and a thousand little things
that don't sound much ; but I never have a moment to myself,
and when I go to bed, I'm so sleepy I'm off before my head
touches the pillow. Besides I like to be a great deal with my
Aunts — I'm a great bore, aren't I, Aunt Emma?" (she smiled
at old Mrs. Paley, who with head slightly drooped was regard-
ing the cake with speculative affection), "and father has to be
very careful about chills in winter which means a great deal
of running about, because he won't look after himself, any
more than you will, Arthur ! So it all mounts up !"

Her voice mounted too, in a mild ecstasy of satisfaction
with her life and her own nature. Rachel suddenly took a
violent dislike to Susan, ignoring all that was kindly, modest,
and even pathetic about her. She appeared insincere and
cruel ; she saw her grown stout and prolific, the kind blue eyes
now shallow and watery, the bloom of the cheeks congealed
to a network of dry red canals. _

Helen turned to her. "Did you go to church?" she asfed.
She had won her sixpence and seemed making ready to go.

"Yes," said Rachel. "For the last time," she added.

In preparing to put on her gloves, Helen dropped one.

"You're not going?" Evelyn asked, taking hold of one glove
as if to keep them.

"It's high time we went," said Helen. "Don't you see how
silent every one's getting ?"

A silence had fallen upon them all, caused partly by one of
the accidents of talk, and partly because they saw some one
approaching. Helen could not see who it was, but keeping
her eyes fixed upon Rachel observed something which made
her say to herself, "So it's Hewet." She drew on her gloves

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with a curious sense of the significance of the moment. Then
she rose, for Mrs. Flushing had seen Hewet too, and was de-
manding information about rivers and boats which showed
that the whole conversation would now come over again.

Rachel followed her, and they walked in silence down the
avenue. In spite of what Helen had seen and understood, the
feeling that was uppermost in her mind was now curiously
perverse ; if she went on this expedition, she would not be able
to have a bath ; the effort appeared to her to be great and dis-
agreeable.

"It's so unpleasant, being cooped up with people one hardly
knows," she remarked. "People who mind being seen naked/'

"You don't mean to go?" Rachel asked.

The intensity with which this was spoken irritited Mrs.
Ambrose.

"I don't mean to go, and I don't mean not to go," she replied.
She became more and more casual and indifferent. #

"After all, I daresay we've seen all there is to be seen ; and
there's the bother of getting there, and whatever they may say
it's bound to be vilely uncomfortable."

For some time Rachel made no reply; but every sentence
Helen spoke increased her bitterness. At last she broke out —

"Thank God, Helen, I'm not like you! I sometimes think
you don't think or feel or care or do anything but exist!
You're like Mr. Hirst. You see that things are bad, and you
pride yourself on saying so. It's what you call being honest;
as a matter of fact it's being lazy, being dull, being nothing.
You don't help ; you put an end to things."

Helen smiled as if she rather enjoyed the attack.

"Well?" she enquired.

"It seems to me bad — ^that's all," Rachel replied.

"Quite likely," said Helen.

At any other time Rachel would probably have been silenced
by her Aunt's candour ; but this afternoon she was not in the
mood to be silenced by any one. A quarrel would be welcome.

"You're only half alive," she continued.

"Is that because I didn't accept Mr. Flushing's invitation ?"
Helen asked, "or do you always think that ?"

At the moment it appeared to Rachel that she had always

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seen the same faults in Helen, from the very first night on
board the Euphrosyne, in spite of her beauty, in spite of her
magnanimity and their love.

"Oh, it's only what's the matter with every one!" she ex-
claimed. "No one feels — no one does an)rthing but hurt. 'I
tell you, Helen, the world's bad. It's an agony, living, want-
mg

Here she tore a handful of leaves from a bush and crushed
them to control herself.

"The lives of these people," she tried to explain, "the aim-
lessness, the way they live. One goes from one to another,
and it's all the same. One never gets what one wants out of
any of them."

Her emotional state and her confusion would have made her
an easy prey if Helen had wished to argue or had wished to
draw confidences. But instead of talking she fell into a pro-
found silence as they walked on. Aimless, trivial, meaning-
less, oh no— what she had seen at tea made it impossible for her
to believe that. The little jokes, the chatter, the inanities of
the afternoon had shrivelled up before her eyes. Underneath
the likings and spites, the comings together and partings, great
things were happening — ^terrible things, because they were so
great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and
dead leaves she had seen the movement of a snake. It seemed
to her that a moment's respite was allowed, a moment's make-
believe, and then again the profound and reasonless law as-
serted itself, moulding them all to its liking, making and de-
stroying.

She looked at Rachel walking beside her, still crushing the
leaves in her fingers and absorbed in her own thoughts. She
was in love, and she pitied her profoundly. But she roused
herself from these thoughts and apologised. "I'm very sorry,"
she said, "but if I'm dull, it's my nature, and it can't be helped."
If it was a natural defect, however, she found an easy remedy,
for she went on to say that she thought Mr. Flushing's scheme
a very good one, only needing a little consideration, which it
appeared she had given it by the time they reached home. By
that time they had settled that if anything more was said, they
would accept the invitation.

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CHAPTER XX

WHEN considered in detail by Mr. Flushing and Mrs.
Ambrose the expedition proved neither dangerous nor
difficult. They found also that it was not even unusual. Every
year at this season English people made parties which steamed
a short way up the river, landed, and looked at the native vil-
lage, bought a certain number of things from the natives, and
returned again without damage done to mind or body. When
it was discovered that six people really wished the same thing
the arrangements were soon carried out.

Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the
river, and nothing had been done to change its appearance from
what it was to the eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time
of Elizabeth was only distant from the present time by a mo-
ment of space compared with the ages which had passed since
the water had run between those banks, and the green thickets
swarmed there, and the small trees grown to huge wrinkled
trees in solitude. Changing only with the change of the sun
and the clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for
century after century, and the water had run between its banks
ceaselessly, sometimes washing away earth and sometimes the
branches of trees, while in other parts of the world one town
had risen upon the ruins of another town, and the men in the
towns had become more and more articulate and unlike each
other. A few miles of this river were visible from the top of
the mountain where some weeks before the party from the
hotel had picnicked. Susan and Arthur had seen it as they
kissed each other, and Terence and Rachel as they sat talking
about Richmond, and Evelyn and Perrott as they strolled about,
imagining that they were great captains sent to colonise the
world. They had seen the broad blue mark across the sand
where it flowed into the sea, and the green cloud of trees mass
themselves about it farther up, and finally hide its waters alto-

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gether from sight. At intervals for the first twenty miles or
so houses were scattered on the bank ; by degrees the houses
became huts, and, later still, there was neither hut nor house,
but trees and grass, which were seen only by hunters, explorers,
or merchants, marching or sailing, but making no settlement.

By leaving Santa Marina early in the morning, driving
twenty miles and riding eight, the party, which was composed
finally of six English people, reached the river-side as the night
felL They came cantering through the trees — Mr. and Mrs.
Flushing, Helen Ambrose, Rachel, Terence, and St. John. The
tired little horses then stopped automatically, and the English
dismounted. Mrs. Flushing strode to the river-bank in high
spirits. The day had been long and hot, but she had enjoyed
the speed and the open air; she had left the hotel which she
hated, and she found the company to her liking. The river
was swirling past in the darkness ; they could just distinguish
the smooth moving surface of the water, and the air was full
of the sound of it. They stood in an empty space in the midst
of great tree-trunks, and out there a little green light moving
slightly up and down showed them where the steamer lay in
which they were to embark.

When they all stood upon its deck they found that it was a
very small boat which throbbed gently beneath them for a few
minutes, and then shoved smoothly through the water. They
seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for the trees
closed in front of them, and they could hear all round them
the rustling of leaves. The great darkness had the usual effect
of taking away all desire for communication by making their
words sound thin and small ; and, after walking round the deck
three or four times, they clustered together, yawning deeply,
and looking at the same spot of deep gloom on the banks.
Murmuring very low in the rhythmical tone of one oppressed
by the air, Mrs. Flushing began to wonder where they were
to sleep, for they could not sleep downstairs, they could not
sleep in a doghole smelling of oil, they could not sleep on deck,
they could not sleep — She yawned profoundly. It was as
Helen had foreseen; the question of nakedness had risen al-
ready, although they were half asleep, and almost invisible to
each other. With St. John's help she stretched an awning, and

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persuaded Mrs. Flushing that she could take off her clothes
behind this, and that no one would notice if by chance some
part of her which had been concealed for forty-five years was
laid bare to the human eye. Mattresses were thrown down,
rugs provided, and the three women lay near each other in the
soft open air.

The gentlemen, having smoked a certain number of cig-
arettes, dropped the glowing ends into the river, and looked
for a tim/B at the ripples wrinkling the black water beneath
them, undressed too, and lay down at the other end of the boat.
They were very tired, and curtained from each other by the
darkness. The light from one lantern fell upon a few ropes, a
few planks of the deck, and the rail of the boat, but beyond
that there was unbroken darkness, no light reached their faces,
or the trees which were massed on the sides of the river.

Soon Wilfred Flushing slept, and Hirst slept. Hewet alone
lay awake looking straight up into the sky. The gentle mo-
tion and the black shapes that were drawn ceaselessly across
his eyes had the effect of making it impossible for him to
think. Rachel's presence so near him lulled thought asleep.
Being so near him, only a few paces off at the other end of the
boat, she made it as impossible for him to think about her as it
would have been impossible to see her if she had stood quite
close to him, her forehead against his forehead. In some
strange way the boat became identified with himself, and just
as it would have been useless for him to get up and steer the
boat, so was it useless for him to struggle any longer with the
irresistible force of his own feelings. He was drawn on and
on away from all he knew, slipping over barriers and past
landmarks into unknown waters as the boat glided over the
smooth surface of the river. In profound peace, enveloped
in deeper unconsciousness than had been his for many nights,
he lay on deck watching the tee-tops change their position
h/ slightly against the sky, and arch themselves, and sink and
tower huge, until he passed from seeing them into dreams
where he lay beneath the shadow of vast trees, looking up into
the sky.

When they woke next morning they had gone a considerable
way up the river; on the right was a high yellow bank of sand

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tufted with trees, on th^ left a swamp quivering with long reeds
and tall bamboos on the top of which, swaying slightly, perched
vivid green and yellow birds. The morning was hot and still.
After breakfast they drew chairs together and sat in an irregu-
lar semi-circle in the bow. An awning above their heads pro-
tected them from the heat of the sun, and the breeze which the
boat made aired them softly. Mrs. Flushing was already dot-
ting and striping her canvas, her head jerking this way and
that with the action of a bird nervously picking up grain ; the
others had books or pieces of paper or embroidery on their
knees, at which they looked fitfully and again looked at the
river ahead. At one point Hewet read part of a poem aloud,
but the number of moving things entirely vanquished his words.
He ceased to read, and no one spoke. They moved on imder
the shelter of the trees. There was now a covey of red birds
feeding on one of the little islets to the left, or again a blue-
green parrot flew shrieking from tree to tree. As they moved
on the country grew wilder and wilder. The trees and the
undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the
ground in a multitudinous wrestle ; while here and there a
splendid tree towered high above the swarm, shaking its thin
green umbrellas lightly in the tipper air. Hewet looked at his
book again. The morning was peaceful as the night had been,
only it was very strange because it was light, and he could see
Rachel and hear her voice and be near to her. He felt as if he
were waiting, as if somehow he were stationary among things
that passed over him and around him, voices, people's bodies,
birds, only Rachel too was waiting with him. He looked at her
sometimes as if she must know that they were waiting to-
gether, and being drawn on together, without being able to
oflfer any resistance. Again he read from his book :

Whoever you are holding me now in your hand,
Without one thing all will be useless.

A bird gave a wild laugh, a monkey chuckled a malicious ques-
tion, and, as fire fades in the hot sunshine, his words flickered
and went out.

By degrees as the river narrowed, and the high sandbanks
fell to level ground thickly grown with trees, the sounds of the

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forest could be heard. It echoed like a hall. There were
sudden cries; and then long spaces of silence, such as there
are in a cathedral when a boy's voice has ceased and the echo
of it still seems to haunt about the remote places of the roof.
Once Mr. Flushing rose and spoke to a sailor, and even an-
nounced that some time after luncheon the steamer would stop,
and they could walk a little way through the forest.

"There are tracks all through the trees there," he explained.
"We're no distance from civilisation yet."

He scrutinised his wife's painting. Too polite to praise it
openly, he contented himself with cutting off one half of the
picture with one hand, and giving a flourish in the air with the
other.

"God !" Hirst exclaimed, staring straight ahead. "Don't you
think it's amazingly beautiful ?"

"Beautiful?" Helen enquired. It seemed a strange little
word, and Hirst and herself both so small that she forgot to
answer him.

Hewet felt that he must speak.

"That's where the Elizabethans got their style," he mused,
staring into the profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodig-
ious fruits.

"Shakespeare? I hate Shakespeare!" Mrs. Flushing ex-
claimed; and Wilfred returned admiringly, "I believe you're
the only person who dares to say that, Alice." But Mrs. Flush-
ing went on painting. She did not appear to attach much value
to her husband's compliment, and painted steadily, sometimes
muttering a half-audible word or groan.

The morning was now very hot.

"Look at Hirst !" Mr. Flushing whispered. His sheet of pa-
per had slipped on to the deck, his head lay back, and he drew
a long snoring breath.

Terence picked up the sheet of paper and spread it out be-
fore Rachel. It was a continuation of the poem on God which
he had begun in the chapel, and it was so indecent that Rachd
did not understand half of it although she saw that it was inde-
cent. Hewet began to fill in words where Hirst had left spaces,
but he soon ceased ; his pencil rolled on deck. Gradually they
approached nearer and nearer to the bank on the right-hand

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side, so that the light which covered them became definitely
green, falling through a shade of green leaves, and Mrs. Flush-
ing set aside her sketch and stared ahead of her in silence.
Hirst woke up ; they were then called to luncheon, and while
they ate it, the steamer came to a standstill a little way out
from the bank. The boat which was towed behind them was
brought to the side, and the ladies were helped into it.

For protection against boredom, Hefen put a book of
memoirs beneath her arm, and Mrs. Flushing her paint-box,
and, thus equipped, they allowed themselves to be set on shore
on the verge of the forest.

They had not strolled more than a few hundred yards along
the track which ran parallel with the river before Helen pro-
fessed to find it unbearably hot. The river breeze had ceased,
and a hot steamy atmosphere, thick with scents, came from the
forest.

"I shall sit down here," she annoimced, pointing to the trunk
of a tree which had fallen long ago and was now laced across
and across by creepers and thong-like brambles. She seated
herself, opened her parasol, and looked at the river which was
barred by the stems of trees. She turned her back to the trees
which disappeared in black shadow behind her.

"I quite agree," said Mrs. Flushing, and proceeded to undo
her paint-box. Her husband strolled about to select an inter-
esting point of view for her. Hirst cleared a space on the
ground by Helen's side, and seated himself with great delib-
eration, as if he did not mean to move until he had talked to
her for a long time. Terence and Rachel were left standing
by themselves without occupation. Terence saw that the time
had come as it was fated to come, but although he realised this
he was completely calm and master of himself. He chose to
stand for a few moments talking to Helen, and persuading her
to leave her seat. Rachel joined him too in advising her to
come with them.

"Of all the people I've ever met," he said, "you're the least
adventurous. You might be sitting on green chairs in Hyde
Park. Are you going to sit there the whole afternoon ? Aren't
you going to walk?"

"Oh, no," said Helen, "one's only got to use one's eye.

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There's everything here — everything/' she repeated in a
drowsy tone of voice. "What will jrou gain by walking?"

"Youll be hot and disagreeable by tea-time, we shall be cool
and sweet," put in Hirst. Into his eyes as he looked up at
them had come yellow and green reflections from the sky and
the branches, robbing them of their intentness, and he seamed
to think what he did not say. It was thus taken for granted
by them both that Terence and Rachel proposed to walk into
the woods together; with one look at each other they turned
away.

"Good-bye!" cried Rachel.

"Good-bye. Beware of snakes," Hirst replied. He set-
tled himself still more comfortably under the shade of the
fallen tree and Helen's figure. As they went, Mr. Flushing
called after them, "We must start in an hour. Hewet, please
remember that. An hour."

Whether made by man, or for some reason preserved by
nature, there was a wide pathway striking throu^ the forest
at right angles to the river. It resembled a drive in an English
forest, save that tropical bushes with their sword-like leaves
grew at the side, and the ground was covered with an im-
marked springy moss instead of grass, starred with little yel-
low flowers. As they passed into the depths of the forest the
light grew dimmer, and the noises of the ordinary world were
replaced by those creaking and sighing sounds which suggest
to the traveller in a forest that he is walking at the bottom of
the sea. The path narrowed and turned ; it was hedged in by
dense creepers which knotted tree to tree, and burst here and
there into star-shaped crimson blossoms. The sighing and
creaking up above were broken every now and then by the
jarring cry of some startled animal. The atmosphere was
close and the air came at them in languid puffs of scent. The
vast green light was broken here and there by a round of pure
yellow sunlight which fell through some gap in the immense
umbrella of green above, and in these yellow spaces crimson
and black butterflies were circling and settling. Terence and
Rachel hardly spoke.

Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both
unable to frame any thoughts. There was something between

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Ihem which had to be spoken of. One of them had to begin,
but which of them was it to be ? Then Hewet picked up a red
fruit and threw it as high as he could. When it dropped, he
would speak. They heard the flapping of great wings; they
heard the fruit go pattering through the leaves and eventually
fall with a thud. The silence was again profound.

"Does this frighten you?" Terence asked when the sound of
the fruit falling had completely died away.

"No," she answered. "I like it."

She repeatecf "I like it." She was walking fast, and holding
herself more erect than usual. There was another pause.

"You like being with me ?" Terence asked.

"Yes, with you," she replied.

He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen
upon the world.

"That is what I have felt ever since I knew you," he replied.
"We are happy together." He did not seem to be speaking, or
she to be hearing.

"Very happy," she answered.

They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their
steps unconsciously quickened.

"We love each other," Terence said.

"We love each other," she repeated.

The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in
tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words.
Faster and faster they walked; simultaneously they stopped,
clasped each other in their arms, then, releasing themselves,
dropped to the earth. They sat side by side. Sounds stood
out from the background making a bridge across their silence ;
they heard the swish of the trees and some beast croaking in a
remote world.

"We love each other," Terence repeated, searching into her
face. Their faces were both very pale and quiet, and they said
nothing. He was afraid to kiss her again. By degrees she
drew close to him, and rested against him. In this position
they sat for some time. She said "Terence" once ; he answered
"Rachel."

"Terrible — ^terrible," she murmured after another pause, but
in saying this she was thinking as much of the persistent chum-

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ing of the water as of her own feeling. On and on it went in
the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water. She
observed that the tears were running down Terence's cheeks.

The next movement was on his part. A very long time
seemed to have passed. He took out his watch.

"Flushing said an hour. We've been gone more than half
an hour."

"And it takes that to get back," said Rachel. She raised
herself very slowly. When she was standing up she stretched
her arms and drew a deep breath, half a sigh, half a yawn. She
appeared to be very tired. Her cheeks were white. "Which
way?" she asked.

"There," said Terence.

They began to walk back down the mossy path again. The
sighing and creaking continued far overhead, and the jarring
cries of animals. The butterflies were circling still in the
patches of yellow sunlight. At first Terence was certain of his
way, but as they walked he became doubtful. They had to
stop to consider, and then to return and start once more, for
although he was certain of the direction of the river he was
not certain of striking the point where they had left the oth-
ers. Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning
where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped
or why he turned.

"I don't want to be late," he said, "because — " He put a
flower into her hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly.
"We're so late — so late — so horribly late," he repeated as if he
were talking in his sleep. "Ah — ^this is right. We turn here."

They found themselves again in the broad path, like the
drive in an English forest, where they had started when they
left the others. They walked on in silence as people walking
in their sleep, and were oddly conscious now and again of the
mass of their bodies. Then Rachel exclaimed suddenly,
"Helen!"

In the sunny space at the edge of the forest they saw Helen
still sitting on the tree-trunk, her dress showing very white
in the sun, with Hirst still propped on his elbow by her side.
They stopped instinctively. At the sight of other people they

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could not go on. They stood hand in hand for a minute or two
in silence. They could not bear to face other people.

"But we must go on," Rachel insisted at last, in the curious
dull tone of voice in which they had both been speaking, and
with a great effort they forced themselves to cover the short
distance which lay between them and the pair sitting on the
tree-trunk.

As they approached, Helen turned round and looked at them.
She looked at them for some time without speaking, and when
they were close to her she said quietly:

"Did you meet Mr. Flushing? He has gone to find you.
He thought you must be lost, though I told him you weren't
lost."

Hirst half turned round and threw his head back so that he
looked at the branches crossing themselves in the air above him.

"Well, was it worth the effort ?" he enquired dreamily.

Hewet sat down on the grass by his side and began to fan
himself.

"Hot,*' he said.

Rachel had balanced herself near Helen on the end of the
tree trunk.

"Very hot,** she said.

"You look exhausted anyhow," said Hirst.

"It's fearfully close in those trees," Helen remarked, pick-
ing up her book and shaking it free from the dried blades of
grass which had fallen between the leaves. Then they were
all silent, looking at the river swirling past in front of them
between the trunks of the trees until Mr. Flushing interrupted
them. He broke out of the trees a hundred yards to the left,
exclaiming sharply :

"Ah, so you found the way after all. But it's late — much
later than we arranged, Hewet."

He was slightly annoyed, and in his capacity as leader of the
expedition, inclined to be dictatorial. He spoke quickly, using
curiously sharp, meaningless words.

"Being late wouldn't matter normally, of course," he said,
"but when it's a question of keeping the men up to time "

He gathered them together and made them come down to

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the river-bank, where the boat was waiting to row them out
to the steamer.

The heat of the day was going down, and over their cups
of tea the Flushings tended to become communicative. It
seemed to Terence as he listened to them talking, that exist-
ence now went on in two different layers. Here were the
Flushings talking, talking somewhere high up in the air above
him, and he and Rachel had dropped to the bottom of the world
together. But with something of a child's directness, Mrs.
Flushing had also the instinct which leads a child to suspect
what its elders wish to keep hidden. She fixed Terence with
her vivid blue eyes and addressed herself to him in particular.
What would he do, she wanted to know, if the boat ran upon
a rock and sank.

"Would you care for anythin' but savin' yourself ? Should
I? No, no," she laughed, "not one scrap — don't tell me.
There's only two creatures the ordinary woman cares about,'*
she continued, "her child and her dog; and I don't believe it's
even two with men. One reads a lot about love — ^that's why
poetry's so dull. But what happens in real life, eh? It ain't
love!" she cried.

Terence murmured something unintelligible. Mr. Flush-
ing, however, had recovered his urbanity. He was smoking a
cigarette, and he now answered his wife.

"You must always remember, Alice," he said, "that your
upbringing was very unnatural — unusual, I should say. They
had no mother," he explained, dropping something of the for-
mality of his tone; "and a father — he was a very delightful
man, I've no doubt, but he cared only for racehorses and Greek
statues. Tell them about the bath, Alice."

"In the stable-yard," said Mrs. Flushing. "Covered with
ice in winter. We had to get in; if we didn't, we were
whipped. The strong ones lived — ^the others died. What you
call the survival of the fittest — a most excellent plan, I <Jare-
say, if you've thirteen children !"

"And all this going on in the heart of England, in the nine-
teenth century !" Mr. Flushing exclaimed, turning to Helen.

"I'd treat my children just the same if I had any," said Mrs.
Flushing.

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Every word sounded quite distinctly in Terence's ears ; but
what were they saying, and who were they talking to, and who
were they, these fantastic people, detached somewhere high up
m the air ? Now that they had drunk their tea, they rose and
leant over the bow of the boat. The sun was going down, and
the water was dark and crimson. The river had widened again,
and they were passing a little island set like a dark wedge in
the middle of the stream. Two great white birds with red
lights on them stood there on stilt-like legs, and the beach of
the island was unmarked, save by the skeleton print of birds'
feet. The branches of the trees on the bank looked more
twisted and angular than ever, and the green of the leaves was
lurid and splashed with gold. Then Hirst began to talk, lean-
ing over the bow.

"It makes one awfully queer, don't you find ?" he complained.
**These trees get on one's nerves — it's all so crazy. God's un-
doubtedly mad. What sane person could have conceived a
wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes and alligators?
I should go mad if I lived here — raving mad."

Terence attempted to answer him, but Mrs. Ambrose re-
plied instead. She bade him look at the way things massed
themselves — ^look at the amazing colours, look at the shapes of
the trees. She seemed to be protecting Terence from the ap-
proach of the others.

"Yes," said Mr. Flushing. "And in my opinion," he con-
tinued, "the absence of population to which Hirst objects is
precisely the significant touch. You must admit, Hirst, that a
little Italian town even would vulgarise the whole scene, would
detract from the vastness — the sense of elemental grandeur."
He swept his hand towards the forest, and paused for a mo-
ment, looking at the great^green mass, which was now falling
silent. "I own it makes us seem pretty small — us, but not
them." He nodded his head at a sailor who leant over the
side spitting into the river. "And that, I think, is what my
wife feels, the essential superiority of the peasant "

Under cover of Mr. Flushing's words, which continued now
gently reasoning with St. John and persuading him, Terence
drew Rachel to the side, pointing ostensibly to a great gnarled
tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half in the water. He

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wished, at any rate, to be near her, but he found that he could
say nothing. They could hear Mr. Flushing flowing on, now
about his wife, now about art, now about the future of the
country, little meaningless words floating high in air. As it
was becoming cold he began to pace the deck with Hirst. Frag-
ments of their talk came out distinctly as they passed — ^art,
emotion, truth, reality.

"Is it true, or is it a dream?*' Rachel murmured, when they
had passed.

"It's true, it's true," he replied.

But the breeze freshened, and there was a general desire for
movement. When the party rearranged themselves under
cover of rugs and cloaks, Terence and Rachel were at opposite
ends of the circle, and could not ^peak to each other. But as
the dark descended, the words of the others seemed to curl
up and vanish as the ashes of burnt paper, and left them sitting
perfectly silent at the bottom of the world. Occasional starts
of exquisite joy ran through them, and then they were peace-
ful again.

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CHAPTER XXI

THANKS to Mr. Flushing's discipline, the right stages of
the river were reached at the right hours, and when next
morning after breakfast the chairs were again drawn out in a
semicircle in the bow, the launch was within a few miles of
the native camp which was the limit of the journey. Mr.
Fliishing, as he sat down, advised them to keep their eyes
fixed on the left bank, where they would soon pass a clearing,
and in that clearing was a hut where Mackenzie, the famous
explorer, had died of fever some ten years ago, almost within
reach of civilisation — Mackenzie, he repeated, the man who
went farther inland than any one's been yet. Their eyes turned
that way obediently. The eyes of Rachel saw nothing. Yel-
low and green shapes did, it is true, pass before them, but she
only knew that one was large and another small ; she did not
know that they were trees. These directions to look here and
there irritated her, as interruptions irritate a person absorbed
in thought, although she was not thinking of anything. She
was annoyed with all that was said, and with the aimless move-
ments of people's bodies, because they seemed to interfere
with her and to prevent her from speaking to Terence. Very
soon Helen saw her staring moodily at a coil of rope, and mak-
ing no effort to listen. Mr. Flushing and St. John were en-
gaged in more or less continuous conversation about the future
of the country from a political point of view, and the degree to
which it had been explored ; the others, with their legs stretched
out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence.

Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but
inwardly she was a prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be
ascribed to any one cause. Looking on shore as Mr. Flushing
bade her, she thought the country very beautiful, but also
sultry and alarming. She did not like to feel herself the victim
of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch slipped

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on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself unreason-
ably moved. Whether the unfamiliarity of the forest was the
cause of it, or something less definite, she could not determine.
Her mind left the scene and occupied itself with anxieties for
Ridley, for her children, for far-off things, such as old age and
poverty and death. Hirst, too, was depressed. He had been
looking forward to this expedition as to a holiday, for, once
away from the hotel, surely wonderful things would happen,
instead of which nothing happened, and here they were as un-
comfortable, as restrained, as self-conscious as ever. That, of
course, was what came of looking forward to anything; one
was always disappointed. He blamed Wilfrid Flushing, who
was so well dressed and so formal; he blamed Hewet and
Rachel. Why didn't they talk? He looked at them sitting
silent and self-absorbed, and the sight annoyed him. He sup-
posed that they were engaged, or about to become engaged,
but instead of being in the least romantic or exciting, that was
as dull as everything else; it annoyed him, too, to think that
they were in love. He drew close to Helen and began to tell
her how uncomfortable his night had been, lying on the deck,
sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, and the stars so bright
that he couldn't get to sleep. He had lain awake all night
thinking, and when it was light enough to see, he had written
twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was that
he'd practically proved the fact that God did exist. He did
not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder
what would happen if God did exist — ^"an old gentleman in a
beard and a long blue dressing-gown, extremely testy and dis-
agreeable as he's bound to be? Can you suggest a rh)rme?
God, rod, sod — ^all used ; any others ?"

Although he spoke much as usual, Helen could have seen,
had she looked, that he was also impatient and disturbed. But
she was not called upon to answer, for Mr. Flushing now ex-
claimed "There !" They looked at the hut on the bank, a deso-
late place with a large rent in the roof, and the ground round
it yellow, scarred with fires and scattered with rusty open tins.

"Did they find his dead body there?" Mrs. Flushing ex-
claimed, leaning forward in her eagerness to see the spot where
the explorer had died.

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"They found his body and his skins and a notebook," her
husband replied. But the boat had soon carried them on and
left the place behind.

It was so hot that they scarcely moved^ except now to change
a foot, or, again, to strike a match. Their eyes, concentrated
Upon the bank, were full of the same green reflections, and
their lips were slightly pressed together as though the sights
they were passing gave rise to thoughts, save that Hirst's lips
moved intermittently as half consciously he sought rhymes for
God. Whatever the thoughts of the others, no one said any-
thing for a considerable space. They had grown so accustomed
to the wall of trees on either side that they looked up with a
start when the light suddenly widened out and the trees came
to an end.

"It almost reminds one of an English park," said Mr. Flush-
ing.

Indeed no change could have been greater. On both banks
of the river lay an open lawn-like space, grass covered and
planted, for the gentleness and order of the place suggested
human care, with graceful trees on the top of little mounds.
As far as they could gaze, this lawn rose and sank with the un-
dulating motion of an old English park. The change of scene
naturally suggested a change of position, grateftd to most of
them. They rose and leant over the rail.

"It might be Arundel or Windsor," Mr, Flushing continued,
"if you cut down that bush with the yellow flowers; and, by
Jove, look!"

Rows of brown backs paused for a moment and then leapt,
with a motion as if they were springing over waves, out of
sight.

For a moment no one of them could believe that they had
really seen live animals in the open — a herd of wild deer, and
the sight aroused a childlike excitement in them, dissipating
their gloom.

"I've never in my life seen anything bigger than a hare!"
Hirst exclaimed with genuine excitement. "What an ass I
was not to bring my Kodak !"

Soon afterwards the launch came gradually to a standstill,
and the captain explained to Mr. Flushing that it would be

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pleasant for the passengers if they now went for a stroll on
shore ; if they chose to return within an hour, he would take
them on to the village; if they chose to walk — ^it was only a
mile or two farther on — ^he would meet them at the landing-
place.

The matter being settled, they were once more put on shore :
the sailors, producing raisins and tobacco, leant upon the rail
and watched the six English, whose coats and dresses looked
so strange upon the green, wander off. A joke that was by no
means proper set them all laughing, and then they turned
round and lay at their ease upon the deck.

Directly they landed, Terence and Rachel drew together
slightly in advance of the others.

"Thank God!" Terence exclaimed, drawing a long breath.
"At last we're alone."

"And if we keep ahead we can talk," said Rachel.

Nevertheless, although their position some yards in advance
of the others made it possible for them to say an)rthing they
chose, they were both silent.

"You love me ?" Terence asked at length, breaking the sUence
painfully. To speak or to be silent was equally an effort, for
when they were silent they were keenly conscious of each oth-
er's presence, and yet words were either too trivial or too
large.

She murmured inarticulately, ending, "And you?"

"Yes, yes," he replied ; but there were so many things to be
said, and now that they were alone it seemed necessary to bring
themselves still more near, and to surmount a barrier which
had grown up since they had last spoken. It was difficult,
frightening even, oddly embarrassing. At one moment he was
clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused.

"Now I'm going to begin at the beginning," he said reso-
lutely. "I'm going to tell you what I ought to have told you
before. In the first place, I've never been in love with other
women, but I've had other women. Then I've great faults.
I'm very lazy, I'm moody — " He persisted, in spite of her
exclamation, "You've got to know the worst of me. I'm lust-
ful. I'm overcome by a sense of futility — incompetence. I

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ought never to have asked you to marry me, I expect. I'm a
bit of a snob; I'm ambitious "

"Oh, our faults !" she cried. "What do they matter r' Then
she demanded, "Am I in love — ^is this being in love — ^are we
to marry each other ?"

Overcome by the charm of her voice and her presence, he
exclaimed, "Oh, you're free, Rachel. To you, time will make
no difference, or marriage or "

The voices of the others behind them kept floating, now far-
ther, now nearer, and Mrs. Flushingfs laugh rose clearly by
itself.

"Marriage?" Rachel repeated.

The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they
were bearing too far to the left. Improving their course, he
continued, "Yes, marriage." The feeling that they could not
be united until she knew all about him made him again en-
deavour to explain.

"All that's been bad in me, the things I've put up with — ^the
second best "

She murmured, considered her own life, but could not de-
scribe how it looked to her now.

"And the loneliness!" he continued. A vision of walking
with her through the streets of London came before his eyes.
**We will go for walks together," he said. The simplicity of
the idea relieved them, and for the first time they laughed.
They would have liked had they dared to take each other by
the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on them from
behind had not yet deserted them.

"Books, people, sights — Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson,"
Hewet murmured.

With every word the mist which had enveloped them, mak-
ing them seem unreal to each other, since the previous after-
noon melted a little further, and their contact became more
and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape
they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly
than it had ever appeared before. As upon that occasion at
the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once
more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its
true proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time

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to time, observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing
the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.

After one of these glances she murmured, "Yes, I'm in love.
There's no doubt ; I'm in love with you."

Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart ; drawn so
close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division be-
tween them, and the next moment separate and far away again.
Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, "It will be a fight."

But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of
his eyes, the lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that
he pleased her, and she added :

"Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You're finer
than I am; you're much finer."

He returned her glance and smiled, perceiving, much as she
had done, the very small individual things about her which
made her delightful to him. She was his for ever. This bar-
rier being surmounted, innumerable delights lay before them
both.

"I'm not finer," he answered. "I'm only older, lazier ; a man,
not a woman."

"A man," she repeated, and a curious sense of possession
coming over her, it struck her that she might now touch him;
she put out her hand and lightly touched his cheek. His fingers
followed where hers had been, and the touch of his hand upon
his face brought back the overpowering sense of imreality.
This body of his was unreal ; the whole world was imreal.

"What's happened?" he began. "Why did I ask you to
marry me ? How did it happen ?"

"Did you ask me to marry you ?" she wondered. They faded
far away from each other, and neither of them could remember
what had been said.

"We sat upon the ground," he recollected.

"We sat upon the ground," she confirmed him. The recol-
lection of sitting upon the ground, such as it was, seemed to
unite them again, and they walked on in silence, their minds
sometimes working with difficulty and sometimes ceasing to
work, their eyes alone perceiving the things round them. Now
he would attempt again to tell her his faults, and why he loved
her; and she would describe what she had felt at this time or

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at that time, and together they would interpret her feeling.
So beautiful was the sound of their voices that by degrees they
scarcely listened to the words they framed. Long silences
came between their words, which were no longer silences of
struggle and confusion but refreshing silences, in which trivial
thoughts moved easily. They began to speak naturally of
ordinary things, of the flowers and the trees, how they grew
there so red, like garden flowers at home, and there bent and
crooked like the arm of a twisted old man.

Very gently and quietly, almost as if it were the blood sing-
ing in her veins, or the water of the stream running over
stones, Rachel became conscious of a new feeling within her.
She wondered for a moment what it was, and then said to her-
self, with a little surprise at recognising in her own person so
famous a thing:

"This is happiness, I suppose.*' And aloud to Terence she
spoke, "This is happiness."

On the heels of her words he answered, "This is happiness,"
upon which they guessed that the feeling had sprung in both
of them the same time. They began therefore to describe how
this felt and that felt, how like it was and yet how different ;
for they were very different.

Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters
in which they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet's
name in short, dissevered syllables was to them the crack of
a dry branch or the laughter of a bird. The grasses and
breezes sounding and murmuring all round them, they never
noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and
louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand
dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel's shoulder; it might have
been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass
whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears.
Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shape-
less against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way
and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high
blue heaven, she was speechless and almost without sense. At
last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before
her by her panting. Over her loomed two great heads, the
heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen.

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Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving;
they came together and kissed in the air above her. Broken
fragments of speech came down to her on the ground. She
thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage.
Raising herself and sitting up, she too realised Helen's soft
body, the strong and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling
and breaking in one vast wave. When this fell away, and the
grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and
the earth rolled out flat on each side, and the trees stood up-
right, she was the first to perceive a little row of human figures
standing patiently in the distance. For the moment she could
not remember who they were.

"Who are they?" she asked, and then recollected.

Falling into line behind Mr. Flushing, they were careful to
leave at least three yards' distance between the toe of his boot
and the rim of her skirt.

He led them across a stretch of green by the river-bank and
then through a grove of trees, and bade them remark the signs
of human habitation, the blackened grass, the charred tree-
stumps, and there, through the trees, strange wooden nests,
drawn together in an arch where the trees drew apart, the
village which was the goal of their journey.

Stepping cautiously, they observed the women, who were
squatting on the ground in triangular shapes, moving their
hands, either plaiting straw or in kneading something in bowls.
But when they had looked for a moment undiscovered, they
were seen, and Mr. Flushing, advancing into the centre of the
clearing, was engaged in talk with a lean majestic man, whose
bones and hollows at once made the shapes of the English-
man's body appear ugly and unnatural. The women took no
notice of the strangers, except that their hands paused for a
moment and their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed upon
them with the motionless inexpressive gaze of those removed
from each other far, far beyond the plunge of speech. Their
hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them
as they walked, as they peered into the huts where they could
distinguish guns leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the
floor, and stacks of rushes; in the dusk the solemn eyes of
babies regarded them, and old women stared out too. As they

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sauntered about, the stare followed them, passing over their
legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously, not without hostility,
like the crawl of a winter fly. As she drew apart her shawl
and uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a
woman never left their faces, although they moved uneasily
under her stare, and finally turned away, rather than stand
there looking at her any longer. When sweetmeats were of-
fered them, they put out great red hands to take them, and felt
themselves treading cumbrously like tight-coated soldiers
among these soft instinctive people. But soon the life of the
village took no notice of them; they had become absorbed into
it. The women's hands became busy again with the straw;
their eyes dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something
from the hut, or to catch a straying child, or to cross the space
with a jar balanced on their heads ; if they spoke, it was to cry
some harsh unintelligible cry. Voices rose when a child was
beaten, and fell again; voices rose in song, which slid up a
little way and down a little way, and settled again upon the
same low and melancholy note. Seeking each other, Terence
and Rachel drew together under a tree. Peaceful, and even
beautiful at first, the sight of the women, who had given up
looking at them, made them now feel very cold and melancholy.

"Well," Terence sighed at length, "it makes us seem insignifi-
cant, doesn't it?"

Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she
said, those women sitting under the trees, the trees and the
river. They turned away and began to walk through the trees,
leaning, without fear of discovery, upon each other's arms.
They had not gone far before they began to assure each other
once more that they were in love, were happy, were content;
but why was it so painful being in love, why was there so
much pain in happiness?

The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously
though all differently. St. John had left the others and was
walking slowly down to the river, absorbed in his own thoughts,
which were bitter and unhappy, for he felt himself alone ; and
Helen, standing by herself in the sunny space among the na-
tive women, was exposed to presentiments of disaster. The
cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears high and low ia

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the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top. How small
the little figures looked wandering through the trees! She
became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins, the
delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and
lets the life escape compared with these great trees and deep
waters. A falling branch, a foot that slips, and the earth has
crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus thinking, she
kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so
she could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found
the Flushings by her side.

They were talking about the things they had bought and
arguing whether they were really old, and whether there were
not signs here and there of European influence. Helen was
appealed to. She was made to look at a brooch, and then at a
pair of ear-rings. But all the time she blamed them for having
come on this expedition, for having ventured too far and ex-
posed themselves. Then she roused herself and tried to talk,
but in a few moments she caught herself seeing a picture of a
boat upset on the river in England, at midday. It was morbid,
she knew, to imagine such things ; nevertheless she sought out
the figures of the ^others between the trees, and whenever she
saw them she kept her eyes fixed on them, so that she might
be able to protect them from disaster.

But when the sun went down and the steamer turned and
began to steam back towards civilisation, again her fears were
calmed. In the semi-darkness the chairs on deck and the people
sitting in them were angular shapes, the mouth being indicated
by a tiny burning spot, and the arm by the same spot moving
up or down as the cigar or cigarette was lifted to and from
the lips. Words crossed the darkness, but, not knowing where
they fell, seemed to lack energy and substance. Deep sighs
proceeded regularly, although with some attempt at suppres-
sion, from the large white mound which represented the person
of Mrs. Flushing. The day had been long and very hot, and
now that all the colours were blotted out the cool night air
seemed to press soft fingers upon the eyelids, sealing them
down. Some philosophical remark directed, apparently, at St.
John Hirst missed its aim, and hung so long suspended in the
air until it was engulfed by a yawn, that it was considered

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dead, and this gave the signal for stirring of legs and mur-
murs about sleep. The white mound moved, finally length-
ened itself and disappeared, and after a few turns and paces
St. John and Mr. Flushing withdrew, leaving three chairs still
occupied by three silent bodies. The light which came from a
lamp high on the mast and a sky pale with stars left them with
shapes but without features; but even in this darkness the
withdrawal of the others made them feel each other very near,
for they were all thinking of the same thing. For some time
no one spoke, then Helen said with a sigh, "So you're both very
happy ?"

As if washed by the air her voice sounded more spiritual
and softer than usual. Voices at a little distance answered her,
•'Yes."

Through the darkness she was looking at them both, and
trying to distinguish him. What was there for her to say?
Rachel had passed beyond her guardianship. A voice might
reach her ears, but never again would it carry as far as it had
carried twenty-four hours ago. Nevertheless, speech seemed
to be due from her before she went to bed. She wished to
speak, but she felt strangely old and depressed.

"D'you realise what you're doing?" she demanded. "She's
young, you're both young ; and marriage — " Here she ceased.
They begged her, however, to continue, with such earnestness
in their voices, as if they only craved advice, that she was
led to add :

"Marriage ! well, it's not easy."

"That's what we want to know," they answered, and she
guessed that now they were looking at each other.

"It depends on both of you," she stated. Her face was
turned towards Terence, and although he could hardly see her,
he believed that her words really covered a genuine desire to
know more about him. He raised himself from his semi-re-
cumbent position and proceeded to tell her what she wanted to
know. He spoke as lightly as he could in order to take away
her depression.

"I'm twenty-seven, and I've about seven hundred a year," he
began. "My temper is good on the whole, and health excellent.

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though Hirst detects a gouty tendency. Well, then, I think I'm
very intelligent." He paused as if for confirmation.

Helen agreed.

"Though, unfortunately, rather lazy. I intend to allow
Rachel to be a fool if she wants to, and — Do you find me on
the whole satisfactory in other respects ?" he asked shyly.

"Yes, I like what I know of you," Helen replied. "But then
—one knows so little."

"We shall live in London," he continued, "and—" With
one voice they suddenly enquired whether she did not think
them the happiest people that she had ever known.

"Hush," she checked them, "Mrs. Flushing, remember.
She's behind us."

Then they fell silent, and Terence and Rachel felt instinc-
tively that their happiness had made her sad, and, while they
were anxious to go on talking about themselves, they did not
like to.

"We've talked too much about ourselves," Terence said,
^Tell us "

"Yes, tell us — " Rachel echoed. They were both in the mood
to believe that every one was capable of saying something very
profound.

"What can I tell you?" Helen reflected, speaking more to
herself in a rambling style than as a prophetess delivering a
message. She forced herself to speak.

"After all, though I scold Rachel, I'm not much wiser my-
self. Tm older, of course, I'm half-way through, and you're
just beginning. It's puzzling — sometimes, I think, disappoint-
ing ; the g^eat things aren't as great, perhaps, as one expects —
but it's interesting — Oh, yes you're certain to find it interest-
ing And so it goes on," they became conscious here of

the procession of dark trees into which, as far as they could
see, Helen was now looking, "and there are pleasures where
one doesn't expect them (you must write to your father), and
you'll be very happy, I've no doubt. But I must go to bed,
and if you are sensible you will follow in ten minutes, and so,"
she rose and stood before them, almost featureless and very
large, "Good-night." She passed behind the curtain.

After sitting in silence for the greater part of the ten minutes

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she allowed them, they rose and hung over the raiL Beneath
thelii the smooth black water slipped away very fast and
silently. The spark of a cigarette vanished behind them. "A
beautiful voice," Terence murmured.

Rachel assented. Helen had a beautiful voice.
After a silence she asked, looking up into the sky, "Are we
on the deck of a steamer on a river in South America? Am I
Rachel, are you Terence?'*

The great black world lay round them. As they were drawn
smoothly along it seemed possessed of immense thickness and
endurance. They could discern pointed tree-tops and blunt
rounded tree-tops. Raising their eyes above the trees, they
fixed them on the stars and the pale border of sky above the
trees. The little points of frosty light infinitely far away drew
their eyes and held them fixed, so that it seemed as if they
stayed a long time and fell a great distance when once more
they realised their hands grasping the rail and their separate
bodies standing side by side.

"You'd forgotten completely about me," Terence reproached
her, taking her arm and beginning to pace the deck, "and I
never forget you/'

"Oh, no," she whispered, she had not forgotten, only the

stars — ^the night — ^the dark

"You're like a bird half asleep in its nest, Rachel. You're
asleep. You're talking in your sleep."

Half asleep, and murmuring broken words, they stood in
the angle made by the bow of the boat. It slipped on down
the river. Now a bell struck on the bridge, and they heard
the lapping of water as it rippled away on either side, and once
a bird, startled in its sleep, creaked, flew on to the next tree,
and was silent again. The darkness poured down profusely,
and left them with scarcely any feeling of life, except that
they were standing there together in the darkness.

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CHAPTER XXII

THE darkness fell, but rose again, and as each day spread
widely over the earth and parted them from the strange
day in the forest when they had been forced to tell each other
what they wanted, this wish of theirs was revealed to other
people, and in the process became slightly strange to them-
selves. Apparently it was not SLtiything unusual that had
happened ; it was that they had become engaged to marry each
other. The world, which consisted for the most part of the
hotel and the villa, expressed itself glad on the whole that two
people should marry, and allowed them to see that they were
not expected to take part in the work which has to be done in
order that the world shall go on, but might absent themselves
for a time. They were accordingly left alone until they felt
the silence as if, playing in a vast church, the door had been
shut on them. They were driven to walk alone, and sit alone,
to visit secret places where the flowers had never been picked
and the trees were solitary. In solitude they could express
those beautiful but too vast desires which were so oddly un-
comfortable to the ears of other men and women — desires
for a world, such as their own world which contained two
people seemed to them to be, where people knew each other
intimately and thus judged each other by what was good, and
never quarrelled, because that was waste of time.

They would talk of such questions among books, or out in
the sun, or sitting in the shade of a tree undisturbed. They
were no longer embarrassed, or half-choked with meaning
which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each
other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with
sudden beauties when the comer is turned; the unexpected
happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways
preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was ref resh-

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ingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such cir-
cumstances was not effort but delight.

While Rachel played the piano, Terence sat near her, en-
gaged, as far as the occasional writing of a word in pencil
testified, in shaping the world as it appeared to him now that
he and Rachel were going to be married. It was different cer-
tainly. The book called Silence would not now be the same
book that it would have been. He would then put down his
pencil and stare in front of him, and wonder in what respects
the world was different — it had, perhaps, more solidity, more
coherence, more importance, greater depth. Why, even the
earth sometimes seemed to him very deep; not carved into
hills and cities and fields, but heaped in great masses. He
would look out of the window for ten minutes at a time ; but
no, he did not care for the earth swept of human beings. He
liked human beings — ^he liked them, he suspected, better than
Rachel did. There she was, swaying enthusiastically over her
music, quite forgetful of him, — ^but he liked that quality in
her. He liked the impersonality which it produced in her. At
last, having written down a series of little sentences, with
notes of interrogation attached to them, he observed aloud,
" 'Women — ^under the heading Women I've written :

" *Not really vainer than men. Lack of self-confidence at
the base of most serious faults. Dislike of own sex traditional,
or founded on fact? Every woman not so much a rake at
heart, as an optimist, because they don't think.' What do you
say, Rachel?" He paused with his pencil in his hand and a
sheet of paper on his knee.

Rachel said nothing. Up and up the steep spiral of a very
late Beethoven sonata she climbed, like a person ascending a
ruined staircase, energetically at first, then more laboriously
advancing her feet with effort until she could go no higher and
returned with a rim to begin at the very bottom again.

" 'Again, it's the fashion now to say that women are more
practical and less idealistic than men, also that they have con-
siderable organising ability but no sense of honour'— query,
what is meant by masculine term, honour? — what corresponds
to it in your sex ? Eh ?"

Attacking her staircase once more, Rachel again neglected

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this opportunity of revealing the secrets of her sex. She had,
indeed, advanced so far in the pursuit of wisdom that she al-
lowed these secrets to rest undisturbed; it seemed to be re-
served for a later generation to discuss them philosophically.

Crashing down a final chord with her left hand, she ex-
claimed at last, swinging round upon him:

"No, Terence, it's no good ; here am I, the best musician in
South America, not to speak of Europe and Asia, and I can't
play a note because of you in the room interrupting me every
other second."

"You don't seem to realise that that's what I've been aiming
at for the last half-hour," he remarked. "I've no objection to
nice, simple tunes — indeed, I find them very helpful to literary
composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfor-
tunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain."

He began turning over the little sheets of note-paper which
were scattered on the table, conveying the congratulations of
their friends.

"' all possible wishes for all possible happiness,'" he

read ; "correct, but not very vivid, are they ?"

"They're sheer nonsense!" Rachel exclaimed. "Think of
words compared with sounds!" she continued. "Think of

novels and plays and histories " Perched on the edge of

the table, she stirred the red and yellow volumes contemptu-
ously. She seemed to herself to be in a position where she
could despise all human learning. Terence looked at them too.

"God, Rachel, you do read trash!" he exclaimed. "And
you're behind the times too, my dear. No one dreams of
reading this kind of thing now — antiquated problem plays,
harrowing descriptions of life in the east end — oh, no, we've
exploded all that. Read poetry, Rachel, poetry, poetry,
poetry !"

Picking up one of the books, he began to read aloud, his
intention being to satirise the short sharp bark of the writer's
English; but she paid no attention, and after an interval of
meditation exclaimed:

'T)oes it ever seem to you, Terence, that the world is com-
I)osed entirely of vast blocks of matter, and that we're nothing

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but patches of light — " she looked at the soft spots of sun
wavering over the carpet and up the wall — "like that?"

"No," said Terence, "I feel solid ; immensely solid ; the legs
of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth. But
at Cambridge, I can remember, there were times when one
fell into ridiculous states of semi-coma about five o'clock in
the morning. Hirst does now, I expect — oh, no. Hirst
wouldn't."

Rachel continued, "The day your note came, asking us to
go on the picnic, I was sitting where you're sitting now, think-
ing that; I wonder if I could think that again? I wonder if
the world's changed ? and if so, when it'll stop changing, and
which is the real world?"

'When I first saw you," he began, "I thought you were like
a creature who'd lived all its life among pearls and old bones.
Your hands were wet, d'you remember, and you never said a
word until I gave you a bit of bread, and then you said,
'Human Beings!'"

"And I thought you — a prig," she recollected. "No ; that's
not quite it. There were the ants who stole the tongue, and
I thought you and St. John were like those ants — very big,
very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs.
However, when I talked to you I liked you "

"You fell in love with me," he corrected her. "You were
in love with me all the time, only you didn't know it."

"No, I never fell in love with you," she asserted.

"Rachel — ^what a lie — didn't you sit here looking at my
window — didn't you wander about the hotel like an owl in the
sun ?"

"No," she repeated, "I never fell in love, if falling in love
is what people say it is, and it's the world that tells the lies
and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies — what lies !"

She crumpled together jsl handful of letters from Evelyn
M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan,
and Susan Warrington. It was strange, considering how very
different these people were, that they used almost the same
sentences when they wrote to congratulate her upon her en-
gagement.

That any one of these people had ever felt what she felt,

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or could ever feel it, or had even the right to pretend for a
single second that they were capable of feeling it, appalled her
much as the church service had done, much as the face of the
hospital nurse had done ; and if they didn't feel a thing why
did they go and pretend to ? The simplicity and arrogance and
hardness of her youth, now concentrated into a single spark
as it was by her love of him, puzzled Terence ; being engaged
had not that effect on him ; the world was different, but not in
that way; he still wanted the things he had always wanted,
and in particular he wanted the companionship of other people
more than ever perhaps. He took the letters out of her hand,
and protested:

"Of course they're absurd, Rachel ; of course they say things
just because other people say them, but even so, what a nice
woman Miss Allan is; you can't deny that; and Mrs. Thorn-
bury too; she's got too many children I grant you, but if half-
a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infal-
libly to the tops of their trees — ^hasn't she a kind of beauty —
of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn't she
rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or
a river going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph's been
made governor of the Carroway Islands — ^the youngest gov-
ernor in the service; very good, isn't it?"

But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast
majority of the affairs of the world went on unconnected by
a single thread with her own destiny.

"I won't have eleven children," she asserted ; "I won't have
the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up
and down, as if one were a horse."

"We must have a son and we must have a daughter," said
Terence, putting down the letters, "because, let alone the in-
estimable advantage of being our children, they'd be so well
brought up." They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal
education — how their daughter should be required from in-
fancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard, painted blue, to
suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too prac-
tical; and their son — he should be taught to laugh at great
men, that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore

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ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no
way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.

At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St.
John Hirst. Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seri-
ously convinced of them; he had a mind like a torpedo, he
declared, aimed at falsehood. Where should we all be without
him and his like ? Choked in weeds ; Christians, bigots, — ^why,
Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to
men when they felt drowsy.

"But you'll never see it !" he exclaimed ; "because with all
your virtues you don't, and you never will, care with every
fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth ! You've no re-
spect for facts, Rachel; you're essentially feminine."

She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think good to
produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits
which Terence admired. St. John had said that she was in
love with him ; she would never forgive that ; but the argument
was not one to appeal to a man.

"But I like him," she said, and she thought to herself that
she also pitied him, as one pities those unfortunate people who
are outside the warm mysterious globe full of changes and
miracles in which we ourselves move about ; she thought that
it must be very dull to be St. John Hirst.

She summed up what she felt about him by saying that she
would not kiss him supposing he wished it, which was not
likely.

As if some apology were due to Hirst for the kiss which
she then bestowed upon himself, Terence protested :

"And compared with Hirst I'm a perfect Zany."

The clock here struck twelve instead of eleven,

"We're wasting the morning — I ought to be writing my
book, and you ought to be answering these."

"We've only got twenty-one whole mornings left," said
Rachel. "And my father'll be here in a day or two."

However, she drew a pen and paper towards her and began
to write laboriously,

"My dear Evelyn "

Terence, meanwhile, read a novel which some one else had
written, a process which he found essential to the composi-

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tion of his own. For a considerable time nothing was to be
heard but the ticking of the clock and the fitful scratch of
Rachel's pen, as she produced phrases which bore a consider-
able likeness to those which she had condemned. She was
struck by it herself, for she stopped writing and looked up;
looked at Terence deep in the arm-chair, looked at the differ-
ent pieces of furniture, at her bed in the comer, at the win-
dow-pane which showed the branches of a tree filled in with
sky, heard the clock ticking, and was amazed at the gulf which
lay between all that and her sheet of paper. Would there ever
be a time when the world was one and indivisible? Even
with Terence himself — ^how far apart they could be, how little
she knew what was passing in his brain now ! She then fin-
ished her sentence, which was awkwaril and ugly, and stated
that they were "both very happy, and are going to be married
in the autumn probably and hope to live in London, where
we hope you will come and see us when we get back." Choos-
ing "affectionately," after some further speculation, rather
than sincerely, she signed the letter and was doggedly be-
ginning on another when Terence remarked, quoting from his
book:

"Listen to this, Rachel. 'It is probable that Hugh' (he's
the hero, a literary man), 'had not realised at the time of his
marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagin-
ation usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which sep-
arates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and
desires of the female. ... At first they had been very happy.
The walking tour in Switzerland had been a time of jolly
companionship and stimulating revelations for both of them.
Betty had proved herself the ideal comrade. . . . They had
shouted Love in the Valley to each other across the snowy
slopes of the RifFelhom' (and so on, and so on — I'll skip the
descriptions). . . . 'But in London, after the boy's birth, all
was changed. Betty was an admirable mother ; but it did not
take her long to find out that motherhood, as that function is
understood by the mother of the upper middle classes, did
not absorb the whole of her energies. She was young and
strong, with healthy limbs and a body and brain that called
urgently for exercise. . . .' (In short she began to give tea-

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parties.) . . . 'Coming in late from this singular talk with
old Bob Murphy in his smoky, book-lined room, where the two
men had each unloosened his soul to the other, with the sound
of the traffic humming in his ears, and the foggy London sky
slung tragically across his mind ... he found women's hats
dotted about among his papers. Women's wraps and absurd
little feminine shoes and umbrellas were in the hall. . . .
Then the bills began to come in. . . . He tried to speak frank-
ly to her. He found her lying on the great polar-bear skin
in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with
the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the
diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the deli-
cious curve of her breast — a vision of adorable femininity.
He forgave her all.' (Well, this goes from bad to worse, and
finally, about fifty pages later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket
to Swanage and 'has it out with himself on the downs above
Corfe.' . . . Here there's fifteen pages or so which we'll skip.
The conclusion is . . .) 'They were different. Perhaps, in
the far future, when generations of men had struggled and
failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be,
indeed, what she now made a pretence of being — ^the friend
and companion — ^not the enemy and parasite of man.'

"The end of it is, you see, Hugh went back to his wife,
poor fellow. It was his duty, as a married man. Lord, Ra-
chel," he concluded, "will it be like that when we're married ?"

Instead of answering him she asked^

"Why don't people write about the things they do feel?"

"Ah, that's the difficulty !" he sighed, tossing the book away.

"Well, then, what will it be like when we're married ? What
are the things people do feel?"

She seemed doubtful.

"Sit on the floor and let me look at you," he commanded.
Resting her chin on his knee, she looked straight at him.

He examined her curiously.

"You're not beautiful," he began, "but I like your face.
I like the way your hair grows down in a point, and your
eyes too— they never see an)rthing. Your mouth's too big,
and your cheeks would be better if they had more colour in
them. But what I like about your face is that it makes one

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wonder what the devil you're thinking about — it makes me
want to do that — " He clenched his fist and shook it so near
her that she started back, '^because now you look as if you'd
blow my brains out. There are moments," he continued,
"when, if we stood on a rock together, you'd throw me into
the sea."

Hypnotised by the force of his eyes in hers, she repeated,
"If we stood on a rock together "

To be flung into the sea, to be washed hither and thither,
and driven about the roots of the world — ^the idea was inco-
herently delightful. She sprang up, and began moving about
the room, bending and thrusting aside the chairs and tables
as if she were indeed striking through the waters. He
watched her with pleasure; she seemed to be cleaving a pas-
sage for herself, and dealing triumphantly with the obstacles
which would hinder their passage through life.

*Tt does seem possible !" he exclaimed, "though I've always
thought it the most unlikely thing in the world — I shall be in
love with you all my life, and our marriage will be the most
exciting thing that's ever been done! We'll never have a
moment's peace — " He caught her in his arms as she passed
him, and they fought for mastery, imagining a rock, and the
sea heaving beneath them. At last she was thrown to the
floor, where she lay gasping, and crying for mercy.

"I'm a mermaid! I can swim," she cried, "so the game's
up." Her dress was torn across, and peace being established,
she fetched a needle and thread and began to mend the tear.

"And now," she said, "be quiet and tell me about the
world; tell me about everything that's ever happened, and
I'll tell you — ^let me see, what can I tell you ? — I'll tell you about
Miss Montgomerie and the river party. She was left, you see,
with one foot in the boat, and the other on shore."

They had spent much time already in thus filling out for the
other the course of their past lives, and the characters of their
friends and relations, so that very soon Terence knew not only
what Rachel's aunts might be expected to say upon every oc-
casion, but also how their bedrooms were furnished, and what
kind of bonnets they wore. He could sustain a conversation
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eluding the Rev. William Johnson and Miss Macquoid, the
Christian Scientists, with remarkable likeness to the truth.
But he had known many more people, and was far more
highly skilled in the art of narrative than Rachel was, whose
experiences were, for the most part, of a curiously childlike
and humorous kind, so that it generally fell to her lot to listen
and ask questions.

He told her not only what had happened, but what he had
thought and felt, and sketched for her portraits which fasci-
nated her of what other men and women might be supposed to
be thinking and feeling, so that she became very anxious to go
back to England, which was full of people, where she could
merely stand in the streets and look at them. According to
him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life rea-
sonable, or, if that word was foolish, made it of deep interest
anyhow, for sometimes it seemed possible to understand why
things happened as they did. Nor were people so solitary
and uncommunicative as she believed. She should look for
vanity — for vanity was a common quality — ^first in herself, and
then in Helen, in Ridley, in St. John, they all had their share
of it — and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve
she met; and once linked together by one such tie she would
find them not separate and formidable, but practically indis-
tinguishable, and she would come to love them when she found
that they were like herself. If she denied this, she must de-
fend her belief that human beings were as various as the
beasts at the Zoo, which had stripes and manes, and horns
and hirnips ; and so, wrestling over the entire list of their ac-
quaintances, and diverging into anecdote and theory and spec-
ulation, they came to know each other. The hours passed
quickly, and seemed to them full to leaking-point. After a
night's solitude they were always ready to begin again.

The virtues which Mrs. Ambrose had once believed to exist
in free talk between men and women did in truth exist for
both of them, although not quite in the measure she pre-
scribed. Far more than upon the nature of sex they dwelt
upon the nature of poetry, but it was true that talk which had
no boundaries deepened and enlarged the strangely small
bright view of a girl. In return for what he could tell her she

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brought him such curiosity and sensitiveness of perception,
that he was led to doubt whether any gift bestowed by much
reading and living was quite the equal of that for pleasure
and pain. What would experience give her after all, except
a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a drilled dog
in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it
would look in twenty years' time, when the eyes had dulled,
and the forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which
seem to show that the middle-aged are facing something hard
which the young do not see. What would the hard thing be
for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned to their
life in England.

The thought of England was delightful, for together ihey
would see the old things freshly ; it would be England in June,
and there would be June nights in the country ; and the night-
ingales singing in the lanes, into which they could steal when
the room grew hot; and there would be English meadows
gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and clouds
dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in
the room with her, he wished very often to be back again in
the thick of life, doing things with Rachel.

He crossed to the window and exclaimed, "Lord, how good
it is to think of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and net-
tles, you know, and real grass fields, and farmyards with pigs
and cows, and men walking beside carts with pitchforks —
there's nothing to compare with that here — ^look at the stony
red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white houses
— how tired one gets of it ! And the air, without a stain or a
wrinkle. Fd give anything for a sea mist."

Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country : the
flat land rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long
straight roads, where one can walk for miles without seeing
any one, and the great church towers and the curious houses
clustered in the valleys, and the birds, and the dusk, and the
rain beating against the windows.

"But London, London's the place," Terence continued.
They looked together at the carpet, as though London itself
were to be seen there lying on the floor, with all its spires
and pinnacles pricking through the smoke.

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"On the whole, what I should like best at this moment,"
Terence pondered, "would be to find myself walking down
Kingsway, by those big placards, you know, and turning into
the Strand. Perhaps I might go and look over Waterloo
Bridge for a moment. Then Td go along the Strand past
the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little
archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the
uproar. You hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud.
The Temple's very pleasant. I think I should go and see
if I could find dear old Hodgkin — ^the man who writes books
about Van Eyck, you know. When I left England he was
very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man
had poisoned it. And then Russell lives on the next staircase.
I think you'd like him. He's a passion for Handel. Well,
Rachel," he concluded, dismissing the vision of London, "we
shall be doing that togettier in six weeks' time, and it'll be the
middle of June then, — and June in London — my God! how
pleasant it all is !"

"And we're certain to have it too," she said. "It isn't as if
we were expecting a great deal — only to walk about and
look at things."

"Only a thousand a year and perfect freedom," he replied.
"How many people in London d'you think have that ?"

"And now you've spoilt it," she complained. "Now we've
got to think of the horrors." She looked grudgingly at the
novel which had once caused her perhaps an hour's discom-
fort, so that she had never opened it again, but kept it on her
table, and looked at it occasionally, as some medieval monk
kept a skull, or a crucifix to remind him of the frailty of the
body.

"Is it true, Terence," she demanded, "that women die with
bugs crawling across their faces?"

"I think it's very probable," he said. "But you must admit,
Rachel, that we so seldom think of anything but ourselves
that an occasional twinge is really rather pleasant."

Accusing him of an affectation of cynicism which was just
as bad as sentimentality itself, she left her position by his
side and knelt upon the window sill, twisting the curtain tas-

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sels between her fingers. A vag^e sense of dissatisfaction
filled her.

"What's so detestable in this country," she exclaimed, "is^^
the blue — ^always blue sky and blue sea. It's like a curtain —
all the things one wants are on the other side of that. I want
to know what's going on behind it. I hate these divisions,
don't you, Terence ? One person all in the dark about another
person. Now I liked the Dalloways," she continued, "and
they're gone. I shall never see them again. Just by going
on a ship we cut ourselves oflf entirely from the rest of the
world. I want to see England there — London there — all sorts
of people — why shouldn't one ? why should one be shut up all
by oneself in a room?"

While she spoke thus half to herself and with increasing
vagueness, because her eye was caught by a ship that had just
come into the bay, she did not see that Terence had ceased
to stare contentedly in front of him, and was looking at her
keenly and with dissatisfaction. She seemed to be able to cut
herself adrift from him, and to pass away to unknown places
where she had no need oF him. The thought roused his
jealousy.

"I sometimes think you're not in love with me and never
will be," he said energetically. She started and turned round
at his words.

"I don't satisfy you in the way you satisfy me," he con-
tinued. "There's something I can't get hold of in you. You
don't want me as I want you — ^you're always wanting some-
thing else."

He began pacing up and down the room.

"Perhaps I ask too much," he went on. "Perhaps it isn't
really possible to have what I want. Men and women are too
different. You can't understand — ^you don't understand "

He came up to where she stood looking at him in silence.

It seemed to her now that what he was saying was perfectly /
true, and that she wanted many more things than the love
of one human being — the sea, the sky. She turned again and
looked at the distant blue, which was so smooth and serene
where the sky met the sea; she could not possibly want only
one human being.

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"Or is It only this damnable engagement?" he continued.
"Let's be married here, before we go back — or is it too great
a risk? Are we sure we want to marry each other?"

They began pacing up and down the room, but although
they came very near each other in their pacing, they took care
not to touch each other. The hopelessness of their position
overcame them both. They were impotent; they could never
love each other sufficiently to overcome all these barriers,
and they could never be satisfied with less. Realising this
with intolerable keenness she stopped in front of him and
exclaimed :

'TLet's break it off, then."

The words did more to unite them than any amount of
argument. As if they stood on the edge of a precipice they
clung together. They knew that they could not separate;
painful and terrible it might be, but they were joined for
ever. They lapsed into silence, and after a time crept to-
gether in silence. Merely to be so close soothed them, and sit-
ting side by side the divisions disappeared, and it seemed as
if the world were once more solid and entire, and as if, in
some strange way, they had grown larger and stronger.

It was long before they moved, and when they moved it
was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of
the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves
look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, nei-
ther pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see them-
selves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible
they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass
leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.

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CHAPTER XXIII

BUT no brush was able to efface completely the expression
of happiness, so that Mrs. Ambrose could not treat them
when they came downstairs as if they had spent the morning
in a way that could be discussed naturally. This being so,
she joined in the world's conspiracy to consider them for the
time incapacitated from the business of life, struck by their
intensity of feeling into enmity against life, and almost suc-
ceeded in dismissing them from her thoughts.

She reflected that she had done all that it was necessary to
do in practical matters. She had written a great many letters,
and had obtained Willoughby's consent. She had dwelt so
often upon Mr. Hewefs prospects, his profession, his birth,
appearance, and temperament, that she had almost forgotten
what he was really like. When she refreshed herself by a
look at him, she used to wonder again what he was like, and
then, concluding that they were happy at any rate, thought no
more about it.

She might more profitably consider what would happen in
three years' time, or what might have happened if Rachel had
been left to explore the world under her father's guidance.
The result, she was honest enough to own, might have been
better — ^who knows? She did not disguise from herself that
Terence had faults. She was inclined to think him too easy
and tolerant, just as he was inclined to think her perhaps a
trifle hard — ^no, it was rather that she was uncompromising.
In some ways she found St. John preferable; but then, of
course, he would never have suited Rachel. Her friendship
with St. John was established, for although she fluctuated be-
tween irritation and interest in a way that did credit to the
candour of her disposition, she liked his company on the
whole. He took her outside this little world of love and emo-
tion. He had a grasp of facts. Supposing, for instance, that

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England made a sudden move towards some unknown port
on the coast of Morocco, St. John knew what was at the back
of it, and to hear him engaged with her husband in argument
about finance and the balance of power, gave her an odd sense
of stability. She respected their arguments without always
listening to them, much as she respected a solid brick wall,
or one of those immense municipal buildings which, although
they compose the greater part of our cities, have been built
day after day and year after year by unknown hands. She
•liked to sit and listen, and even felt a little elated when the
engaged couple, after showing their profound lack of inter-
est, slipped from the room, and were seen pulling flowers to
pieces in the garden. It was not that she was jealous of them,
but she did undoubtedly envy them their great unknown fu-
ture that lay before them. Slipping from one such thought
to another, she was at the present moment wandering from
drawing-room to dining-room with fruit in her hands. Some-
times she stopped to straighten a candle stooping with the
heat, or disturbed some too rigid arrangement of the chairs.
She had reason to suspect that Chailey had been balancing her-
self on the top of a ladder with a wet duster during their ab-
sence, and the room had never been quite like itself since. Re-
turning from the dining-room for the third time, she per-
ceived that one of the arm-chairs was now occupied by St.
John. He lay back in it, with his eyes half shut, looking, as
he always did, curiously buttoned up in a neat grey suit, and
fenced against the exuberance of a foreign climate which
might at any moment proceed to take liberties with him. Her
eyes rested on him gently and then passed on over his head.
Rnally she took the chair opposite.

"I didn't want to come here," he said at last, "but I was
positively driven to it. . . . Evelyn M.,'' he groaned.

He sat up, and began to explain with mock solemnity how
the detestable woman was set upon marr)ring him.

"She pursues me about the place. This morning she ap-
peared in the smoking-room. All I could do was to seize my
hat and fly. I didn't want to come, but I couldn't stay and
face another meal with her."

"Well, we must make the best of it," Helen replied philo-

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sophically. It was very hot, and they were indifferent to
any amount of silence, so that they lay back in their chairs
waiting for something to happen. The bell rang for luncheon,
but there was no sound of movement in the house. Was
there any news? Helen asked; an)rthing in the papers? St.
John shook his head. O yes, he had a letter from home, a
letter from his mother, describing the suicide of the. parlour-
maid. She was called Susan Jane," and she came into the
kitchen one afternoon, and said that she wanted cock to keep
her money for her; she had twenty pounds in gold. Then
she went out to buy herself a hat. She came in at half-gast
% five and said that she had taken poison. They had only just
time to get her into bed and call a doctor before she died.

"Well?" Helen enquired.

"There'll have to be an inquest," said St. John.

Why had she done it? He shrugged his shoulders. Why
%do ptople kill themselves? Why do the lower orders do any
of the things they do do? Nobody know's. They sat in
silence.

"The bell's rung fifteen minutes and they're not down," said
Helen at length.

When they appeared, St. John explained why it had been
necessary for him to come to luncheon. He imitated Evelyn's
enthusiastic tone as she confronted him in the smoking-room.
"She thinks there can be nothing quite so thrilling as mathe-
matics, so I've lent her a large work in two volumes. It'll be
interesting to see what she makes of it."

Rachel could now afford to laugh at him. She reminded
him of Gibbon; she had the first volume somewhere still; if
he were undertaking the education of Evelyn, that surely was
the test ; or she had heard that Burke, upon the American Re-
bellion — Evelyn ought to read them 'both simultaneously.
When St. John had disposed of her argument and had satis-
fied his hunger, he proceeded to tell them that the hot^l was
seething with scandals, some of the most appalling kind, which
had happened in their absence ; he was indeed much given to
the study of his kind.

"Evelyn M., for example — but that was told me in confi-
dence.*'

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**Nonscnse/* Terence interposed.

"You've heard about poor Sinclair, too?"

"Oh, yes, I've heard about Sinclair. He's retired to hia
mine with a revolver. He writes to Evelyn daily that he's
thinking of committing suicide. I've assured her that he'a
never been so happy in his life, and, on the whole, she's in*
clined to ^gree with me."

"But then she's entangled herself with Perrott," St. John
continued^ "and I have reason to think; from something I
saw in the passage, that everything isn't as it should be be-
twegp Arthur and Susan. There's a young female lately
arrived from Manchester. A very good thing if it were ^
broken off, in my opinion. Their married life is something too
horrible to contemplate. Oh, and I distinctly heard old Mrs.
Paley rapping out the most fearful oaths as I passed her bed-
room door. It's supposed that she tortures her maid in private
— ^it's practically certain she does. One can tell it from the ^
look in her eyes."

"When yotf re eighty and the gout tweezes you, you'll be
swearing like a trooper," Terence remarked. "You'll be very
fat, very testy, very disagreeable. Can't you imagine him —
bald as a coot, with a pair of sponge-bag trousers, a little
spotted tie, and a corporation?"

After a pause Hirst remarked that the worst infamy had
still to be told. He addressed himself to Helen.

"They've hoofed out the prostitute. One night while we
were away that old numskull Thornbury was doddering about
the passages very late. (Nobody seems to have asked him
what he was up to.) He saw the Signora Lola Mendoza, as
she calls, herself, cross the passage in her nightgown. He
communicated his suspicions next morning to Elliot, with the
result that Rodriguez went to the woman and gave her twen-
ty-four hours in which to clear out of the place. No one
seems to have enquired into the truth of the story, or to have
asked Thornbury and Elliot what business it was of theirs;
they had it entirely their own way. I propose that we should
all sign a Round Robin, go to Rodriguez in a body, and insist
upon a full enquiry. Something's got to be done, don't you
agree ?"

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Hewet remarked that there could be no doubt as to the
lady's profession.

"Still," he added, "it's a great shame, poor woman ; only I
don't see what's to be done "

"I quite agree with you, St. John," Helen burst out. "It's
monstrous. The hypocritical smugness of the English makes
my blood boil. A man who's made a fortune in trade as Mr.
Thombury has is bound to be twice as bad as any prostitute."

She respected St. John's morality, which she took far more
seriously than any one else did, and now entered into a dis-
cussion with him as to the steps that were to be taken to en-
force their peculiar view of what was right. The argument
led to some profoundly gloomy statements of a general na-
ture. Who were they, after all — ^what authority had they —
what power against the mass of superstition and ignorance?
It was the English, of course ; there must be something wrong
in the English blood. Directly you met an English person,
of the middle classes, you were conscious of an indefinable
sensation of loathing; directly you saw the brown crescent of
houses above Dover, the same thing came over you. But un-
fortunately St. John added, you couldn't trust these foreign-
ers

They were interrupted by sounds of strife at the further end
of the table. Rachel appealed to her aunt.

"Terence says we must go to tea with Mrs. Thombury be-
cause she's been so kind, but I don't see it ; in fact, I'd rather
have my right hand sawn in pieces — just imagine! the eyes
of all those women !"

"Fiddlesticks, Rachel," Terence replied. "Who wants to
look at you ? You're consumed with vanity ! You're a mon-
ster of conceit ! Surely, Helen, you ought to have taught her
by this time that she's a person of no conceivable importance
whatever — not beautiful, or well dressed, or conspicuous for
elegance or intellect, or deportment. A more ordinary sight
than you are," he concluded, "except for the tear across your
dress has ftever been seen. However, stay at home if you
want to. I'm going."

She appealed again to her aunt. It wasn't the being looked
at, she explained, but the things people were sure to say. T\^

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women in particular. She liked women, but where emotion
was concerned they were as flies on a lump of sugar. They
would be certain to ask her questions. Evelj^n yL would say :
"Are you in love? Is it nice being in love?" ^And Mss.
Thombury — ^her eyes would go up and down, up and down —
she shuddered at the thought of it. Indeed, the retirement
of their life since their engagement had made her so sensitive,
that she was not exaggerating her case.

She found an ally in Helen, who proceeded to expound her
views of the human race, as she regarded with complacency
the pyramid of variegated fruits in the centre of the table. It
wasn't that they were cruel, or meant to hurt, or even stupid
exactly; but she had always found that the ordinary person
had so little emotion in his own life that the scent of it in the
lives of others was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of a
bloodhound. Warming to the theme, she continued :

"E^rectly anything happens — it may be a marriage, or a
birth, or a death — on the whole they prefer it to be death —
every one wants to see you. They insist upon seeing you.
They've got nothing to say; they don't care a rap for you;
but youVe got to go to lunch or to^ tea or to dinner, and if
you don't you're damned. It's the smell of blood," she con-
tinued; "I don't blame 'em; only they shan't have mine if I
know it!"

She looked about her as if she had called up a legion oi^
human beings, all hostile and all disagreeable, who encircled
the table, with mouths gaping for blood, and made it appear
a little island of neutral country in the midst of the enemy's
country.

Her words roused her husband, who had been muttering
rhythmically to himself, surveying his guests and his food and
his wife with eyes that were now melancholy and now fierce,
according to the fortunes of the lady in his ballad. He cut
Helen short with a protest. He hated even the semblance of
cynicism in women. "Nonsense, nonsense," he remarked
abruptly.

Terence and Rachel glanced at each other across the table,
which meant that when they were married they would not
bthave like that. The entrance of Ridley into the conversa-

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tion had a strange Cifect. It became at once more formal and
more polite. It would have been impossible to talk quite
easily of anythip^f that came into their heads, and to say the
word prg^titute as simply as any other word. The talk now
turned upon literature and politics, and Ridley told stories of
the distinguished people he had known in his youth. Such
talk was of the nature of an art, and the personalities and
informalities of the young were silenced. As they rose to go,
Helen stopped for a moment, leaning her elbows on the table.

"You've all been sitting here," she said, "for almost an hour,
and you haven't noticed my figs, or my flowers, or the way
the light comes through, or anything. I haven't been listening,
because I've been looking at you. You looked very beautiful ;
I wish you'd go on sitting for ever."

She led the way to the drawing-room, where she took up
her embroidery, and began again to dissuade Terence from
walking down to the hotel in this heat. But the more she
dissuaded, the more he was determined to go. He became
irritated and obstinate. There were moments when they al-
most disliked each other. He wanted other people ; he wanted
Rachel to see them with him. He suspected that Mrs. Am-
brose would now try to dissuade her from going. He was
annoyed by all this space and shade and beauty, and Hirst,
recumbent, drooping a magazine from his wrist.

"I'm going," he repeated. "Rachel needn't come unless
she wants to."

"If you go, Hewet, I wish you'd make enquiries about the
prostitute," said Hirst. "Look here," he added, "I'll walk
half the way with you."

Greatly to their surprise he raised himself, looked at his
watch, and remarked that, as it was now half an hour since
luncheon, the gastric juices had had sufficient time to secrete ;
he was trying a system, he explained, which involved short
spells of exercise interspaced by longer intervals of rest.

"I shall be back at four," he remarked to Helen, "when I
shall lie down on the sofa and relax all my muscles com-
pletely."

"So you're going, Rachel?" Helen asked. "You won't stay
with me?"

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She smiled, but she might have been sad.

Was she sad, or was she really laughing? Rachel could
not tell, and she felt for the moment very uncomfortable be-
tween Helen and Terence. Then she turned away, saying
merely that she would go with Terence, on condition that he
did all the talking.

A narrow border of shadow ran along the road, which was
broad enough for two, but not broad enough for three. St.
John therefore dropped a little behind the pair, and the dis-
tance between them increased by degrees. Walking with a
view to digestion, and with one eye upon his watch, he looked
from time to time at the pair in front of hini. They seemed
to be so happy, so intimate, although they were walking side
by side much as other people walk. They turned slightly
toward each other now and then, and said something which
he thought must be something very private. They were really
disputing about Helen's character, and Terence was trying^
to explain why it was that she annoyed him so much some-
times. But St. John thought that they were saying things
which they did not want him to hear, and was led to thinly
of his own isolation. These people were happy, and in, som^i
ways he despised them for being made happy so simply, anit
in -Other ways he envied them. He was much more remar e-
able than they were, but he was not happy. People neves
liked him; he doubted sometimes whether even Helen lik<^i
him. To be simple, to be able to say simply what one felif '-
without the terriiSc self-consciousness which possessed him,
and showed him his own face and words perpetually in a
mirror, that would be worth almost any other gift, fdr it
made one happy. Happiness, happiness, what was happiness?
He was never happy. He saw too clearly the little vices
and deceits and flaws of life, and, seeing them, it seemed to
him honest to take notice of them. That was the reason, no
doubt, why people generally disliked him, and complained that
he was heartless and bitter. Certainly they never told him
the things he wanted to be told, that he was nice and kind,
and that they liked him. But it was true that half the sharp
things that he said about them were said because he was un-
happy or hurt himself. But he admitted that he had very

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seldom told any one that he cared for them, and when he had
been demonstrative, he had generally regretted it afterwards.
His feelings about Terence and Rachel were so complicated
that he had never yet been able to bring himself to say that
he was glad that they were going to be married. He saw their
faults so clearly, and the inferior nature of a great deal of
their feeling for each other, and he expected that their love
would not last. He looked at them again, and, very strangely,
for he was so used to thinking that he very seldom saw any-
thing, the look of them filled him with a simple emotion of
affection in which there were some traces of pity also. What,
after all, did people's faults matter in comparison with what
• was good in them ? He resolved that he would now tell them
what he felt. He quickened his pace and came up with them
just as they reached the comer where the lane joined the
main road. They stood still and began to laugh at him, and

to ask him whether the gastric juices ^but he stopped them

and began to speak very quickly and stiffly.
\ "D'you remember the morning after the dance?" he de-
jnandcd. "It was here we sat, and you talked nonsense, and
Rachel made little heaps of stones. I, on the other hand, had
. Jie whole meaning of life revealed to me in a flash." He
lused for a second, and drew his lips together in a tight
j.^^tle purse. "Love," he said. "It seems to me to explain ev-
ything. So, on the whole, I'm very glad that you two are
^ing to be married." He then turned round abruptly, with-
out looking at them, and walked back to the villa. He felt
both exalted and ashamed of himself for having thus said what
he felt. Probably they were laughing at him, probably they
thought him a fool, and, after all, had he really said what he
felt?

It was true that they laughed when he was gone; but the
dispute about Helen which had become rather sharp, ceased,
and they became peaceful and friendly.

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CHAPTER XXIV

THEY reached the hotel rather early in the afternoon, so
that most people were still lying down, or sitting speech-
less in their bedrooms, and Mrs. Thombury, although she had
asked them to tea, was nowhere to be seen. They sat down,
therefore, in the shady hall, which was almost empty, and full
of the light swishing sounds of air going to and fro in a large,
empty space. Yes, this arm-chair was. the same arm-chair in
which Rachel had sat that afternoon when Evelyn came up,
and this was the magazine she had been looking at, and this
the very picture, a picture of New York by lamplight. How
odd it seemed — ^nothing had changed.

By degrees a certain number of people began to come down
the stairs and to pass through the hall, and in this dim light
their figures possessed a sort of grace and beauty, although
they were all unknown people. Sometimes they went straight
through and out into the garden by the swing door, some-
times they stopped for a few minutes and bent over the tables
and began turning over the newspapers. Terence and Rachel
sat watching them through their half-closed eyelids — ^the
Johnsons, the Parkers, the Baileys, the Simmons', the Lees, the
Morleys, the Campbells, the Gardiners. Some were dressed
in white flannels and were carrying racquets under their arms,
some were short, some tall, some were only children, and some
perhaps were servants, but they all had their standing, their
reason for following each other through the hall, their money,
their position, whatever it might be. Terence soon gave up
looking at them, for he was tired; and, closing his eyes, he
fell half asleep in his chair. Rachel watched the people for
some time longer ; she was fascinated by the certainty and the -
grace of their movements, and by the inevitable way in which
they seemed to follow each other, and loiter and pass on and
disappear. But after a time her thoughts wandered, and she

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hegSLti to think of the dance, which had been held in this
room, only then the room itself looked quite different. Glanc-
ing round, she could hardly believe that it was the same room.
It had looked so bare and so bright and formal on that night
when they came into it out of the darkness ; it had been filled,
too, with little red, excited faces, always moving, and people
so brightly dressed and so animated that they did not seem in
the least like real people, nor did you feel that you could talk
to them. And now the room was dim and quiet, and beautiful
silent people passed through it, to whom you could go and
say anything you liked. She felt herself amazingly secure as
she sat in her arm-chair, and able to review not only the night
of the dance, but the entire past, tenderly and humorously,
as if she had been turning in a fog for a long time, and could
now see exactly where she had turned. For the methods by
which she. had reached her present position, seemed to her
very strange, and the strangest thing about them was that
she had not known where they were leading her. That was
the strange thing, that one did not know where one was going,
or what one wanted, and followed blindly, suffering so much
in secret, always unprepared and amazed and knowing nothing;
but one thing led to another and by degrees something had
formed itself out of nothing, and so one reached at last this
calm, this quiet, this certainty, and it was this process tl'at
people called living. Perhaps, then, every one really knew as
she knew now where they were going; and things forme t
themselves into a pattern not only for her, but for them, and
in that pattern lay satisfaction and meaning. When she lookecif
back she could see that a meaning of some kind was apparenl
in the lives of her aunts, and in the brief visit of the Dallo-l-
ways whom she would never see again, and in the life of*
her father. j

The sound of Terence, breathing deep in his slumber, con-l
firmed her in her calm. She was not sleepy although she did!
not see anything very distinctly, but although the figures pass- \
ing through the hall became vaguer and vaguer, she believed
that they all knew exactly where they were going, and the
sense of their certainty filled her with comfort. For the mo- i
ment she was as detached and disinterested as if she had no

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longer any lot in life, and she thought that she could now
accept anything that came to her without being perplexed by
the form in which it appeared. What was there to frighten
or to perplex in the prospect of life? Why should this in-
sight ever again desert her? The world was in truth so large,
so hospitable, and after all it was so simple. "Love," St. John
had said, "that seems to explain it all." Yes, but it was not
the love of man for woman, of Terence for Rachel. Al-
though they sat so close together, they had ceased to be little
separate bodies; they had ceased to struggle and desire one
another. There seemed to be peace between them. It might
be love, but it was not the love of man for woman.

Through her half-closed eyelids she watched Terence lying
back in his chair, and she smiled as she saw how big his mouth
was, and his chin so small, and his nose curved like a switch-
back with a knob at the end. Naturally, looking like that he
was lazy, and ambitious, and full of moods and faults. She
remembered their quarrels, and in particular hoW they had
been quarrelling about Helen that very afternoon, and she
thought how often they would quarrel in the thirty, or forty,
or fifty years in which they would be living in the same house
together, catching trains together, and getting annoyed be-
cause they were so different. But all this was superficial, and
had nothing to do with the life that went on beneath the eyes
and the mouth and the chin, for that life was independent of
her, and independent of everything else. So too, although-,
she was going to marry him and to live with him for thirty,
or forty, or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to
him, she was independent of him; she was independent of
everything else. Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love
that made her undersfand this, for she had never felt this in-
dependence, this calm, and this certainty until she fell in love
with him, and perhaps this too was love. She wanted nothing
else.

For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at
a little distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully
in their arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether
to disturb them or not, and then, seeming to recollect some-
thing, she came across the hall. The sound of her approach

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woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes. He heard
Miss Allan talking to Rachel.

"Well," she was saying, *'this is very nice. It is very nice
indeed. Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It
cannot often happen that two couples who have never seen
each other before meet in the same hotel and decide to get
married." Then she paused and smiled, and seemed to have
nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her
whether it was true that she had finished her book. Some one
had said that she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she
turned to him with a livelier expression than usual

"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said.
"That is, omitting Swinburne — Beowulf to Browning — I
rather like the two B's myself. Beowulf to Browning," she
repeated, "I think that is the kind of title which might catch
one's eye on a railway bookstall."

She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book,
for no one knew what an amount of determination had gone
to the making of it. Also she thought that it was a good piece
of work, and, considering what anxiety she had been in about
her brother while she wrote it, she could not resist telling them
a little more about it.

"I must confess,'^ she continued, "that if I had known how
many classics tfiere are in English literature, and how verbose
the best of them contrive to be, I should never have under-
taken the work. They only allow one seventy thousand words,
you see."

"Only seventy thousand words !" Terence exclaimed.

"Yes, and one has to say something about everybody," Miss
Allan added. "That is what I find so difficult, sa)ring some-
thing different about everybody." Then she thought that she
had said enough about herself, and she asked whether they
had come down to join the tennis tournament. "The young
people are very keen about it. It begins again in half an hour."

Her gaze rested benevolently upon them both, and, after
a momentary pause, she remarked, looking at Rachel as if she
had remembered something that would serve to keep her dis-
tinct from other people :

"You're the remarkable person who doesn't like ginger."

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But the kindness of the smile in her rather worn and cour-
ageous face made them feel that although she would scarcely
remember them as individuals, she had laid upon them the bur-
den of the new generation.

"And in that I quite agree with her," said a voice behind ;
Mrs. Thornbury had overheard the last few words about not
liking ginger. "It's associated in my mind with a horrid old
aunt of ours (poor thing, she suffered dreadfully, so it isn't
fair to call her horrid) who used to give it us when we were
small, and we never had the courage to tell her we didn't like
it. We just had to put it out in the shrubbery — she had a big
house near Bath."

They began moving slowly across the hall, when they were
stopped by the impact of Evelyn, who dashed into them, as
though in running downstairs to catch them her legs had got
beyond her control.

"Well," she exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm, seizing
Rachel by the arm, "I call this splendid! I guessed it was
going to happen from the very beginning! I saw you two
were made for each other. Now you've just got to tell me
all about it — when's it to be, where are you going to live —
are you both tremendously happy?"

But the attention of the group was diverted to Mrs. Elliot,
who was passing them with her eager but uncertain movement,
carrying in her hands a plate and an empty hot-water bottle.
She would have passed them, but Mrs. Thornbury went up and
stopped her.

"Thank you, Hughling's better," she replied, in answer to
Mrs. Thornbury's enquiry, "but he's not an easy patient. He
wants to know what his temperature is, and if I tell him he
gets anxious, and if I don't tell him he suspects. You know
what men are when they're ill ! And of course there are none
of the proper appliances, and, though he seems very willing
and anxious to help" (here she lowered her voice mysterious-
ly), "one can't feel that Dr. Rodriguez is the same as a proper
doctor. If you would come and see him, Mr. Hewet," she
added, "I know it would cheer him up — ^lying there in bed
all day — ^and the flies — But I must go and find Angelo— the
food here — of course, with an invalid, one wants things par-

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ticularly nice." And she hurried past them in search of the
head waiter. The worry of nursing her husband had fixed a
plaintive frown upon her forehead; she was pale and looked
unhappy and more than usually inefficient, and her eyes wan-
dered more vaguely than ever from point to point.

"Poor thing!" Mrs. Thombury exclaimed. She told them
that for some days Hughling Elliot had been ill, and the only
doctor available was the brother of the proprietor, or so the
proprietor said, whose right to the title of doctor was not
above suspicion.

"I know how wretched it is to be ill in a hotel," Mrs.
Thombury remarked, once more leading the way with Rachel
to the garden. "I spent six weeks on my honeymoon in hav-
ing typhoid at Venice," she continued. "But even so, I look
back upon them as some of the happiest weeks in my life. Ah,
yes," she said, taking Rachel's arm, "you think yourself happy
now, but it's nothing to the happiness that comes afterwards.
And T assure you I could find it in my heart to envy you
young people ! YouVe a much better time than we had, I may
tell you. When I look back upon it, I can hardly believe how
things have changed. When we were engaged I wasn't allowed
to go for walks with William alone — some one had always to
be in the room with us — I really believe I had to show my
parents all his letters! — ^though they were very fond of him
too. Indeed, I may say they looked upon him as their own
son. It amuses me," she continued, "to think how strict they
were to us, when I see how they spoil their grandchildren !"

The table was laid under the tree again, and taking her place
before the teacups, Mrs. Thombury beckoned and nodded un-
til she had collected quite a number of people, Susan and Ar-
thur and Mr. Pepper, who were strolling about, waiting for
the tournament to begin. A murmuring tree, a river brim-
ming in the moonlight, Terence's words came back to Rachel
as she sat drinking the tea and listening to the words which
flowed on so lightly, so kindly, and with such silvery smooth-
ness. This long life and all these children had left her very
smooth; they seemed to have rubbed away the marks of in-
dividuality, and to have left only what was old and maternal.

"And the things you young people are going to see !" Mrs.

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Thombury continued. She included them all in her forecast,
she included them all in her maternity, although the party
comprised William Pepper and Miss Allan, both of whom
might have been supposed to have seen a fair share of the
panorama. "When I see how the world has changed in my
lifetime," she went on, "I can set no limit to what may hap-
pen in the next fifty years. Ah, no, Mr. Pepper, I don't agree
with you in the least," she laughed> interrupting his gloomy
remark about things going steadily from bad to worse. "I
know I ought to feel that, but I don't, Fm afraid. They're
going to be much better people than we were. Surely every-
thing goes to prove that. All around me I see women, young
women, women with household cares of every sort, going out
and doing things that we should not have thought it possible
to do."

Mr. Pepper thought her sentimental and irrational like all
old women, but her manner of treating him as if he were a
cross old baby baffled him and charmed him, and he could only
reply to her with a curious grimace which was more a smile
than a frown.

"And they remain women," Mrs. Thombury added. "They
give a great deal to their children."

As she said this she smiled slightly in the direction of Su-
san and Rachel. They did not like to be included in the same
k)t, but they both smiled a little self-consciously, and Arthur
and Terence glanced at each other too. She made them feel
that they were all in the same boat together, and they looked
at the women they were going to marry and compared them.
It was inexplicable how any one could wish to marry Rachel,
incredible that any one should be ready to spend his life with
Susan; but singular though the other's taste must be, they
bore each other no ill-will on account of it; indeed, each
liked the other rather the better for the eccentricity of his
choice.

"I really must congratulate you," Susan remarked, as she
leant across the table for the jam.

There seemed to be no foundation for St. John's gossip
about Arthur and Susan. Sunburnt and vigorous they sat
side by side, with their racquets across their knees, not say-

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ing much but smiling slightly all the time. Through the thin
white clothes which they wore, it was possible to see the lines
of their bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their mus-
cles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was natural to think
of the firm-fleshed sturdy children that would be theirs. Their
faces had too little shape in them to be beautiful, but they
had clear eyes and an appearance of great health and power
of endurance, for it seemed as if the blood would never cease
to run in his veins, or to lie deeply and calmly in her cheeks.
Their eyes at the present moment were brighter than usual,
and wore the peculiar expression of pleasure and self-confi-
dence which is seen in the eyes of athletes, for they had been
playing tennis, and they were both first-rate at the game.

Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from
Susan to Rachel. Well — ^they had both made up their minds
very easily, they had done in a very few weeks what it some-
times seemed to her that she would never be able to do. Al-
though they were so different, she thought that she could see
in each the same look of satisfaction and completion, the
same calmness of manner, and the same slowness of move-
ment. It was that slowness, that confidence, that content which
she hated, she thought to herself. They moved so slowly
because they were not single but double, and Susan was at-
tached to Arthur, and Rachel to Terence, and for the sake of
this one man they had renounced all other men, and movement,
and the real things of life. Love was all very well, and those
snug domestic houses, with the kitchen below and the nursery
above, which were so secluded and self-contained, like little
islands in the torrents of the world ; but the real things were
surely the things that happened, the causes, the wars, the
ideals, which happened in the great world outside, and went
on independently of these women, turning so quietly and
beautifully towards the men. She looked at them sharply.
Of course they were happy and content, but there must be
better things than that. Surely one could get nearer to life,
one could get more out of life, one could enjoy more and feel
more than they would ever do. Rachel in particular looked
so young — what could she know of life? She became rest-

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less, and getting up, crossed over to sit beside Rachel. She
reminded her that she had promised to join her club.

"The bother is," she went on, "that I mayn't be able to
start work seriously till October. Fve just had a letter from
a friend of mine whose brother is in business in Moscow.
They want me to stay with them, and as they're in the thick
of all the conspiracies and anarchists, I've a good mind to
stop on my way home. It sounds too thrilling." She wanted
to make Rachel see how thrilling it was. "My friend knows
a girl of fifteen who's been sent to Siberia for life merely be-
cause they caught her addressing a letter to an anarchist. And
the letter wasn't from her, either. I'd give all I have in the
world to help on a revolution against the Russian government,
and it's bound to come."

She looked from Rachel to Terence. They were both a lit-
tle touched by the sight of her remembering how lately they*
had been listening to evil words about her, and Terence asked
her what her scheme was, and she explained that she was going
to found a club — sl club for doing things, really doing them.
She became very animated, as she talked on and on, for she
professed herself certain that if once twenty people — ^no, ten
would be enough if they were keen — set about doing things
instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish al-
most every evil that exists. It was brains that were needed.
If only people with brains — of course they would want a room,
a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet
once a week. . . .

As she talked Terence could see the traces of fading youth
in her face, the lines that were being drawn by talk and ex-
citement round her mouth and eyes, but he did not pity her;
looking into those bright, rather hard, and very courageous
eyes, he saw that she did not pity herself, or feel any desire to
exdiange her own life for the more refined and orderly lives
of people like himself and St. John, although, as the years
went by, the fight would become harder and harder. Perhaps,
though, she would settle down; perhaps, after all, she would
marry Perrott. While his mind was half occupied with what
she was saying, he thought of her probable destiny, the light

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clouds of tobacco smoke serving to obscure his face from her
eyes.

Terence smoked and Arthur smoked and Evelyn smoked,
so that the air was full of the mist and fragrance of good
tobacco. In the intervals when no one spoke, they heard far
off the low murmur of the sea, as the waves quietly broke
and spread the beach with a film of water, and withdrew to
break again. The cool green light fell through the leaves of
the tree, and there were soft crescents and diamonds of sun-
shine upon the plates and the table-cloth. Mrs. Thombury,
after watching them all for a time in silence, began to ask
Rachel kindly questions — ^When did they all go back? Oh,
they expected her father. She must want to see her father —
there would be a great deal to tell him, and (she looked sympa-
thetically at Terence) he would be so happy, she felt sure.
Years ago, she continued, it might have been ten or even
twenty years ago, she remembered meeting Mr. Vinrace at
a party, and, being so much struck by his face, which was so
unlike the ordinary face one sees at a party, that she had asked
who he was, and she was told that it was Mr. Vinrace, and
she had always remembered the name, — ^an uncommon name, —
and he had a lady with Him, a very sweet-looking women, but
it was one of those dreadful London crushes, where you don't
talk, — ^you only look at each other, — ^and though she had
shaken hands with Mr. Vinrace, she didn't think they had
said anything. She sighed very slightly, remembering the
past.

Then she turned to Mr. Pepper, who had become very de-
pendent on her, so that he always chose a seat near her, and
attended to what she was saying, although he did not often
make any remark of his own.

"You who know everything, Mr. Pepper," she said, "tell
us how did those wonderful French ladies manage their salons ?
Did we ever do anything of the same kind in England, or do
you think that there is some reason why we cannot do it in
England?''

Mr. Pepper was pleased to explain very accurately why
there has never been an English salon. There were three
reasons, and they were very good ones, he said. As for him-

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self, when he went to go to a party, as one was sometimes
obliged to, from a wish not to give offence — his niece, for
example, had been married the other day — he walked into
the middle of the room, said "Ha! ha!" as loud as ever he
could, considered that he had done his duty, and walked away
again. Mrs. Thornbury protested. She was going to give
a party directly she got back, and they were all to be invited,
and she should set people to watch Mr. Pepper, and if she
heard that he had been caught saying **Ha ! ha !" she would —
she would do something very dreadful indeed to him. Arthur
Venning suggested that what she must do was to rig up some-
thing in the nature of a surprise — a portrait, for example, of
a nice old lady in a lace cap, concealing a bath of cold water,
which at a signal could be sprung on Pepper's head ; or they'd
have a chair which shot him twenty feet high directly he sat
on it^

Susan laughed. She had done her tea; she was feeling
very well contented, partly because she had been playing tennis
brilliantly, and then every one was so nice ; she was beginning
to find it so much easier to talk, and to hold her own even
with quite clever people, for somehow clever people did not
frighten her any more. Even Mr. Hirst, whom she had dis-
liked when she first met him, really wasn't disagreeable ; and,
poor man, he always looked so ill; perhaps he was in love;
perhaps he had been in love with Rachel — she really shouldn't
wonder ; or perhaps it was Evelyn — she was of course very at-
tractive to men. Leaning forward, she went on with the con-
versation. She said that she thought that the reason why
parties were so dull was mainly because gentlemen will not
dress : even in London, she stated, it struck her very much how
people don't think it necessary to dress in the evening, and
of course if they don't dress in London they won't dress in
the country. It was really quite a treat at Christmas-time when
there were the Hunt balls, and the gentlemen wore nice red
coats, but Arthur didn't care for dancing, so she supposed that
they wouldn't go even to the ball in their little country town.
She didn't think that people who were fond of one sport often
cared for another, although her father was an exception. But
then he was an exception in every way — such a gardener, and

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he knew all about birds and animals, and of course he was
simply adored by all the old women in the village, and at the
same time what he really liked best was a book. You always
knew where to find him if he were wanted; he would be in
his study with a book. Very likely it would be an old, old
book, some fusty old thing that no one else would dream of
reading. She used to tell him that he would have made a
first-rate old bookworm if only he hadn't had a family of six
to support, and six children, she added, charmingly confident of
universal sympathy, didn't leave one much time for being a
bookworm.

Still talking about her father, of whom she was very proud,
she rose, for Arthur upon looking at his watch found that it
was time they went back again to the tennis court. The others
did not move.

"They're very happy!" said Mrs. Thombury, looking
benignantly after them. Rachel agreed; they seemed to be
so certain of themselves; they seemed to know exactly what
they wanted.

"D'you think they are happy?" Evelyn murmured to Ter-
ence in an undertone, and she hoped that he would say that
he did not think them happy ; but, instead, he said that they
must go too-— go home, for they were always being late for
meals, and Mrs. Ambrose, who was very stem and particular,
didn't like that. Evelyn laid hold of Rachel's skirt and pro-
tested. Why should they go? It was still early, and she had
so many things to say to them.

"No," said Terence, "we must go, because we walk so
slowly. We stop and look at things, and we talk."

"What d'you talk about?" Evel)m enquired, upon which he
laughed and said that they talked about everything.

Mrs. Thornbury went with them to the gate, trailing very
slowly and gracefully across the grass and the gravel, and
talking all the time about flowers and birds. She told them
that she had taken up the study of botany since her daughter
married, and it was wonderful what a number of flowers there
were which she had never seen, although she had lived in the
country all her life and she was now seventy-two. It was a
good thing to have some occupation which was quite inde-

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pendent of other people, she said, when one got old. But the
odd thing was that one never felt old. She always felt that
she was twenty-five, not a day more or a day less, but, of
course, one couldn't expect other people to agree to that.

"It must be very wonderful to be twenty-five and not merely
to imagine that you're twenty-five," she said, looking from
one to the other with her smooth, bright glance. "It must be
very wonderful, very wonderful indeed." She stood talking
to them at the gate for a long time ; she seemed reluctant that
they should go.

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CHAPTER XXV

THE afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the
waves on the shore sounded Hke the repeated sigh of
some exhausted creature, and even on the terrace under an
awning the bricks were hot, and the air danced perpetually
over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the stone basins
were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which
had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now
dry, and their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiflf and
hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be
grown upon spines, still remained standing upright and defied
the determination of the sun to beat them down. It was too
hot to talk, and it was not easy to find any book that would
withstand the power of the sun. Many books had been tried
and then let fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud,
because he said the words of Milton had substance and shape,
so that it was not necessary to understand what he was saying ;
one could merely listen to his words ; one could almost handle
them.

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,

he read.

That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.
Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure;
Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine,
That had the sceptre from his father Brute.

The words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be
laden with meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that
it was painful to listen to them; they sounded strange; they
meant different things from what they usually meant. Rachel
at any rate could not keep her attention fixed upon them, but

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went off upon curious trains of thought su^ested by words
such as "curb" and "Locrine'* and "Brute," which brought un-
pleasant sights before her eyes, independently of their mean-
ing. Owing to the heat and the dancing air the garden too
looked strange — ^the trees were either too near or too far, and
her head almost certainly ached. She was not quite certain,
and therefore she did not know, whether to tell Terence now,
or to let him go on reading. She decided that she would wait
until he came to the end of a stanza, and if by that time she
had turned her head this way and that, and it ached in every
position undoubtedly, she would say very calmly that her
head ached.

Sabrina fair.

Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair,
Listen for dear honour's sake,

Goddess of the silver lake.

Listen and save t

But her head ached ; it ached whichever way she turned it.

She sat up and said as she had determined, "My head aches
so that I shall go indoors."

He was half-way through the next verse, but he dropped the
book instantly.

"Your head aches?" he repeated.

For a few moments they sat looking at one another in
silence, holding each other's hands. During this time his
sense of dismay and catastrophe were almost physically pain-
ful; all round him he seemed to hear the shiver of broken
glass which, as it fell to earth, left him sitting in the open air.
But at the end of two minutes, noticing that she was not
sharing his dismay. But was only rather more languid and
heavy-eyed than usual, he recovered, fetched Helen, and asked
her to tell them what they had better do, for Rachel had a
headache.

Mrs. Ambrose was not discomposed, but advised that she
should go to bed, and added that she must expect her head
to ache if she sat up to all hours and went out in the heat.

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but a few hours in bed would cure it completely. Terence
was unreasonably reassured by her words, as he had been tin-
reasonably depressed the moment before. Helen's sense seemed
to have much in common with the ruthless good sense of
nature, which avenged rashness by a headache, and, like
nature's good sense, might be depended upon.

Rachel went to bed ; she lay in the dark, it seemed to her,
for a very long time, but at length, waking from a transparent
kind of sleep, she saw the windows white in front of her, and
recollected that some time before she had gone to bed with a
headache, and that Helen had said it would be gone when she
woke. She supposed, therefore, that she was now quite well
again. At the same time the wall of her room was painfully
white, and curved slightly, instead of being straight and flat.
Turning her eyes to the window, she was not reassured by
what she saw there. The movement of the blind as it filled
with air and blew slowly out, drawing the cord with a little
trailing sotmd along the floor, seemed to her terrifying, as if
it were the movement of an animal in the room. She shut
her eyes, and the pulse in her head beat so strongly that each
thump seemed to tread upon a nerve, piercing her forehead
with a little stab of pain. It might not be the same headache,
but she certainly had a headache. She turned from side to
side, in the hope that the coolness of the sheets would cure her,
and that when she next opened her eyes to look the room
would be as usual. After a considerable number of vain ex-
periments, she resolved to put the matter beyond a doubt. She
got out of bed and stood upright, holding on to the brass ball
at the end of the bedstead. Ice-cold at first, it soon became
as hot as the palm of her hand, and as the pains in her head
and body and the instability of the floor proved that it would
be far more intolerable to stand and walk than to lie in bed,
she got into bed again ; but though the change was refreshing
at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great as the discom-
fort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she would have
to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head on the
pillow, relinquished the happiness of the day.

When Helen came in an hour or two later, suddenly stopped
her cheerful words, looked startled for a second and then

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tmnaturally calm, the fact that she was ill was put beyond
a doubt It was confirmed when the whole household knew of
it, when the song that some one was singing in the garden
stopped suddenly, and when Maria, as she brought water,
slipped past the bed with averted eyes. There was all the
morning to get through, and then all the afternoon, and at
intervals she made an effort to cross over into the ordinary
World, but she found that her heat and discomfort had put a
gulf between her world and the ordinary world which she
could not bridge. At one point the door opened, and Helen
came in with a little dark man who had — ^it was the chief thing
she noticed about him — ^very hairy hands. She was drowsy
and intolerably hot, and as he seemed shy and obsequious she
scarcely troubled to answer him, although she tmderstood that
he was a doctor. At another point the door opened and
Terence came in very gently, smiling too steadily, as she
realised, for it to be natural. He sat down and talked to her,
stroking her hands until it became irksome to her to lie
any more in the same position and she turned round, and
when she looked up again Helen was beside her and Terence
had gone. It did not matter; she would see him to-morrow
when things would be ordinary again. Her chief occupation
during the day was to try to remember how the lines went:

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave.

In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber dropping hair;

and the efifort worried her because the adjectives persisted in
getting into the wrong places.

The second day did not differ very much from the first
day, except that her bed had become very important, and the
world outside, when she tried to think of it, appeared distinctly
further off. The glassy, cool, translucent wave was almost
visible before her, curling up at the end of the bed, and as it
was refreshingly cool she tried to keep her mind fixed upon it.
Helen was here, and Helen was there all day long ; sometimes
she said that it was lunchtime, and sometimes that it was tea-
time ; but by the next day all landmarks were obliterated, and
the outer world was so far away that the different sounds, such

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as the sounds of people passing on the stairs, and the sounds
of people moving overhead, could only be ascribed to their
cause by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what
she had felt, or of what she had been doing and thinking
three days before, had faded entirely. On the other hand,
every object in the room, and the bed itself, and her own body
with its various limbs and their different sensations were
more and more important each day. She was completely cut
off, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world,
isolated alone with her body.

Hours and hours would pass thus, without getting any fur-
ther through the morning, or again a few minutes would lead
from broad daylight to the depths of the night. One evening
when the room appeared very dim, either because it was
evening or because the blinds were drawn, Helen said to her,
"Some one is going to sit here to-night. You won't mind?**

Opening her eyes, Rachel saw not only Helen but a nurse
in spectacles, whose face vaguely recalled something that she
had once seen. She had seen her in the chapel.

"Nurse Mclnnis," said Helen, and the nurse smiled steadily
as they all did, and said that she did not find many people who
were frightened of her. After waiting for a moment they
both disappeared, and having ttimed on her pillow Rachel woke
to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights
which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures —
thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties,
and then the thirties, and then the forties. She realised that
there is nothing to prevent nights from doing this if they
choose. At a great distance an elderly woman sat with her
head bent down ; Rachel raised herself slightly and saw with
dismay that she was playing cards by the light of a candle
which stood in the hollow of a newspaper. The sight had
something inexplicably sinister about it, and she was terrified
and cried out, upon which the woman laid down her cards and
came across the room, shading the candle with her hands.
Coming nearer and nearer across the great space of the room,
she stood at last above Rachel's head and said, "Not asleep?
Let me make you comfortable."

She put down the candle and began to arrange the bed-

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clothes. It struck Rachel that a woman who sat playing cards
in a cavern all night long would have very cold hands, and
she shrunk from the touch of them.

"Why, there's a toe all the way down there!" the woman
said, proceeding to tuck in the bedclothes. Rachel did not
realise that the toe was hers.

"You must try and lie still," she proceeded, "because if
you lie still you will be less hot, and if you toss about you
will make yourself more hot, and we don't want you to be any
hotter than you are." She stood looking down upon Rachel
for an enormous length of time.

"And the quieter you lie the sooner you will be well," she
repeated.

Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the
ceiling, and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire
that this shadow should move. But the shadow and the woman
seemed to be eternally fixed above her. She shut her eyes.
When she opened them again several more hours had passed,
but the night still lasted interminably. The woman was still
playing cards, only she sat now in a tunnel under a river,
and the light stood in a little archway in the wall above her.
She cried "Terence!" and the peaked shadow again moved
across "the ceiling, as the woman with an enormous slow move-
ment rose, and they both stood still above her.

"It's just as difficult to keep you in bed as it was to keep
Mr. Forrest in bed," the woman said, "and he was such a tall
gentleman."

In order to get rid of this terrible stationary sight Rachel
again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a
tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed
women sitting in archways pla)dng cards, while the bricks of
which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into
drops and slid down the wall. But the little old women became
Helen and Nurse Mclnnis after a time, standing in the
window together whispering, whispering incessantly.

Meanwhile outside her room the sounds, the movements,
and 'the lives of the other people in the house went on in the
ordinary light of the sun, throughout the usual succession of
hours. When, on the first day of her illness, it became clear

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that she would not be absolutely well, for her temperature was
very high, until Friday, that day being Tuesday, Terence was
filled with resentment, not against her, but against the force
outside them which was separating them. He counted up the
number of days that would almost certainly be spoilt for them.
He realised, with an odd mixture of pleasure and annoyance,
that, for the first time in his life, he was so dependent upon
another person that his happiness was in her keeping. The
days were completely wasted upon trifling, immaterial things,
for after three weeks of such intimacy and intensity all the
usual occupations were unbearably flat and beside the point.
The least intolerable occupation was to talk to St. John about
Rachel's illness, and to discuss every symptom and its mean-
ing, and, when this subject was exhausted, to discuss illness
of all kinds, and what caused them, and what cured them.

Twice every day Ee went in to sit with Rachel, and twice
every day the same thing happened.. On going into her room,
whidh was not very dark, where the music was lying about
as usual, and her books and letters, his spirits rose instantly.
When he saw her he felt completely reassured. She did not
look very ill. Sitting by her side he would tell her what he
had been doing, using his natural voice to speak to her, only
a few tones lower down than usual ; but by the time he had sat
there for five minutes he was plimged in the deepest gloom.
She was not the same ; he could not bring them back to their
old relationship; but although he knew that it was foolish he
could not prevent himself from endeavouring to bring her
back, to make her remember, and when this failed he was in
despair. He always concluded as he left her room that it
was worse to see her than not to see her, but by degrees, as
the day wore on, the desire to see her returned and became
almost too great to be borne.

On Thursday morning when Terence went into her room
he felt the usual increase of confidence. She turned round and
made an effort to remember certain facts from the world that
was so many millions of miles away.

"You have come up from the hotel?" she asked.

"No; I'm staying here for the present," he said. "We've
just had luncheon," he continued, "and the mail has come in.

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There's a bundle of letters for you — letters from England."

Instead of saying, as he meant her to say, that she wished
to see them, she said nothing for some time.

"You see, there they go, rolling oflf the edge of the hill,'*
she said suddenly.

"Rolling, Rachel? What do you see rolling? There's
nothing rolling."

"The old woman with the knife," she replied, not speaking
to Terence in particular, and looking past him. As she ap-
peared to be looking at a vase on the shelf opposite, he rose
and took it down.

"Now they can't roll any more," he said cheerfully. Never-
theless she lay gazing at the same spot, and paid him no further
attention although he spoke to her. He became so profoundly
wretched that he could not endure to sit with her, but wandered
about until he found St. John, who was reading The Times in
the verandah. He laid it aside patiently, and heard all that
Terence had to say about delirium. He was very patient with
Terence. He treated him like a child.

By Friday it could not be denied that the illness was no
longer an attack that would pass off in a day or two ; it was
a real illness that required a good deal of organisation, and
engrossed the attention of at least five people, but there was
no reason to be anxious. Instead of lasting five days it was
going to last ten days. Rodriguez was understood to say that
there were well-known varieties of this illness. Rodriguez
appeared to think that they were treating the illness with
undue anxiety. His visits were always marked by the same
show of confidence, and in his interviews with Terence he
always waved aside his anxious and minute questions with a
kind of flourish which seemed to indicate that they were all
taking it much too seriously. He seemed curiously unwilling
to sit down.

"A high temperature," he said, looking furtively about the
room, and appearing to be more interested in the furniture and
in Helen's embroidery than in anything else. "In this climate
you must expect a high temperature. You need not be alarmed
by that. It is the pulse we go by" (he tapped his own hairy
wrist), "and the pulse continues excellent"

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Thereupon he bowed and slipped out. The interview wa3
conducted laboriously upon both sides in French, and this,
together with the fact that he was optimistic, and that Terence
respected the medical profession from hearsay, made him less
critical than he would have been had he encountered the doctor
in any other capacity. Unconsciously he took Rodriguez' side
against Helen, who seemed to have taken an tmreasonable
prejudice against him.

When Saturday came it was evident that the hours of the
day must be more strictly organised than they had been. St.
John oil ered his services ; he said that he had nothing to do,
and that he might as well spend the day at the villa if he could
be of use. As if they were starting on a diflficult expedition
together, they parcelled out their duties between them, writing
out an elaborate scheme of hours upon a large sheet of paper
which was pinned to the drawing-room door. Their distance
from the town, and the difficulty of procuring rare things
with unknown names from the most unexpected places, made
it necessary to think very carefully, and they found it unex-
pectedly difficult to do the simple but practical things that
were required of them, as if they, being very tall, were asked
to stoop down and arrange minute grains of sand in a pattern
on the ground.

It was St. John's duty to fetch what was needed from the
town, so that Terence would sit all through the long hot hours
alone in the drawing-room, near the open door, listening for
any movement upstairs, or call from Helen. He always for-
got to pull down the blinds, so that he sat in bright sunshine,
which worried him without his knowing what was the cause of
it. The room was terribly stiff and uncomfortable. There
were hats in the chairs, and medicine bottles among the books.
He tried to read, but good books were too good, and bad
books were too bad, and the only thing he could tolerate was
the newspaper, which with its news of London, and the move-
ments of real people who were giving dinner-parties and
making speeches, seemed to give a little background of reality
to what was otherwise mere nightmare. Then, just as his atten-
tion was fixed on the print, a soft call would come from Helen,
or Mrs. Chailey would bring in something which was wanted

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tipstairs, and he would run up very quietly in his socks, and
put the jug on the little table which stood crowded with jugs
and cups outside the bedroom door; or if he could catch Helen
for a moment he would ask, *'How is she?"

"Rather restless. . . . On the whole, quieter, I th^nk."

The answer would be one or the other.

As usual she seemed to reserve something which she did not
say, and Terence was conscious that they disagreed, and, with-*
out saying it aloud, were arguing against each other. But she
was too hurried and preoccupied to talk.

The strain of listening, and the effort of making practical
arrangements and seeing that things worked smoothly, ab-
sorbed all Terence's power. Involved in this long dreary
nightmare, he did not attempt to think what it amounted to.
Rachel was ill ; that was all ; he must see that there was medi-
cine and milk, and that things were ready when they Were
wanted. Thought had ceased ; life itself had come to a stand-
still. Stmday was rather worse than Saturday had been, sim-
ply because the strain was a little greater every day, although
nothing else had changed. The separate feelings of pleasure,
interest, and pain, which combine to make up the ordinary
day, were merged in one long-drawn sensation of sordid misery
and profound boredom. He had never been so bored since
he was shut up in the nursery alone as a child. The vision
of Rachel as she was now, confused and heedless, had almost
obliterated the vision of her as she had been once long ago;
he could hardly believe that they had ever been happy, or
engaged to be married, for what were feelings, what was there
to be felt? Confusion covered every sight and person, and he
seemed to see St. John, Ridley, and the stray people who came
up now and then from the hotel to enquire, through a mist ;
the only people who were not hidden in this mist were Helen
and Rodriguez, because they could tell him something definite
about Rachel.

Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain
hours they went into the dining-room, and when they sat round
the table they talked about indifferent things. St. John gen-
erally made it his business to start the talk and to keep it from
dying out.

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"I've discovered the way to get Sancho past the white
house," said St. John on Sunday at luncheon. "You crackle
a piece of paper in his ear, then he bolts for about a hundred
yards, but he goes on quite well after that."

"Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has com."

"I don't think much of the stuff they give him ; and Angelo
seems a dirty little rascal."

There was then a long silence. Ridley murmured a few
lines of poetry under his breath, and remarked, as if to con-
ceal the fact that he had done so, "Very hot to-day."

"Two degrees higher than it was yesterday," said St. John.
"I wonder where these nuts come from," he observed, taking
a nut out of the plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looldng
at it curiously.

"London, I should think," said Terence, looking at the
nut too.

"A competent man of business could make a fortune here
in no time," St. John continued. "I suppose the heat does
something funny to people's brains. Even the English go a
little queer. Anyhow they're hopeless people to deal with.
They kept me three-quarters of an hour waiting at the chemist's
this morning, for no reason whatever."

There was another long pause. Then Ridley enquired,
"Rodriguez seems satisfied?"

"Quite," said Terence with decision. "It's just got to run
its course." Whereupon Ridley heaved a deep sigh. He was
genuinely sorry for every one, but at the same time he missed
Helen considerably, and was a little aggrieved by the constant
presence of the two young men.

They moved back into the drawing-room.

"Look here. Hirst," said Terence, "there's nothing to be
done for two hours." He consulted the sheet pinned to the
door. "You go and lie down. I'll wait here. Chailey sits
with Rachel while Helen has her luncheon."

It was asking a good deal of Hirst to tell him to go without
waiting for a sight of Helen. These little glimpses of Helen
were the only respites from strain and boredom, and very
often they seemed to make up for the discomfort of the day,
although she might not have an)rthing to tell them. However,

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as they were on an expedition together, he had made up his
mind to obey.

Helen was very late in coming down. She looked like a
person who has been sitting for a long time in the dark. She
was pale and thinner, and the expression of her eyes was
harassed but determined. She ate her luncheon quickly, and
seemed indifferent to what she was doing. She brushed aside
Terence's enquiries, and at last, as if he had not spoken, she
looked at him with a slight frown and said:

"We can't go on like this, Terence. Either you've got to
find another doctor, or you must tell Rodriguez to stop coming,
and I'll manage for myself. It's no use for him to say that
Rachel's better; she's not better; she's worse."

Terence suffered a terrific shock, like that which he had
suffered when Rachel said, "My head aches." He stilled it by
reflecting that Helen was overwrought, and he was upheld in
this opinion by his obstinate sense that she was opposed to him
in the arg^ument.

**Do you think she's in danger?" he asked.

"No one can go on being as ill as that day after day — "
Helen replied. She looked at him, and spoke as if she felt
some indignation with somebody.

"Very well, I'll talk to Rodriguez this afternoon," he replied,

Helen went upstairs at once.

Nothing now could assuage Terence's anxiety. He could
not read, nor could he sit still, and his sense of security was
shaken, in spite of the fact that he was determined that Helen
was exaggerating, and that Rachel was not very ill. But he
wanted a third person to confirm him in his belief.

Directly Rodriguez came down he demanded, "Well, how is
she? Do you think her worse?"

"There is no reason for anxiety, I tell you — ^none,"
Rodriguez replied in his execrable French, smiling tmeasily,
and making little movements all the time as if to get away.

Hewet stood firmly between him and the door. He was
determined to see for himself what kind of man he was. His
confidence in the man vanished as he looked at him and saw
his insignificance, his dirty appearance, his shiftiness, and

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his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that he had never
seen this before.

"You won't object, of course, if we ask you to consult an-
other doctor ?' he continued.

At this the little man became openly incensed.

"Ah!" he cried. "You have not confidence in me? You
object to my treatment? You wish me to give up the case?"

"Not at all," Terence replied, "but in serious illness of
this kind "

Rodriguez shrugged his shoulders.

"It is not serious, I assure you. You are over-anxious. The
young lady is not seriously ill, and I am a doctor. The lady
of course is frightened," he sneered. "I understand that per-
fectly."

"The name and address of the doctor is ?" Terence con-
tinued.

"There is no other doctor," Rodriguez replied sullenly.
"Every one has confidence in me. Look ! I will show you."

He took out a packet of old letters and began turning them
over as if in search of one that would confute Terence's sus-
picions. As he searched, he began to tell a story about an
English lord who had trusted him — a great English lord,
whose name he had, unfortunately, forgotten.

"There is no other doctor in the place," he concluded, still
turning over the letters.

"Never mind," said Terence shortly. "I will make enquiries
for myself." Rodriguez put the letters back in his pocket

"Very well," he remarked. "I have no objection."

He lifted his eyebrows, shru^ed his shoulders, as if to
repeat that they took the illness much too seriously and that
there was no other doctor, and slipped out, leaving behind him
an impression that he was conscious that he was distrusted,
and that his malice was aroused.

After this Terence could no longer stay downstairs. He
went up, knocked at Rachel's door, and asked Helen whether
he might see her for a few minutes. He had not seen her yes-
terday. She made no objection, and went and sat at a table
in the window.

Terence sat down by the bedside. Rachel's face was

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changed. She looked as though she were entirely concentrated
upon the effort of keeping alive. Her lips were drawn, and
her cheeks were simken and flushed, though without colour.
Her eyes were not entirely shut, the lower half of the white
part showing, not as if she saw, but as if they remained open
because she was too much exhausted to close them. She
opened them completely when he kissed her. But she only saw
an old woman slicing a man's head off with a knife.

"There it falls!" she murmured. She then turned to
Terence and asked him anxiously some question about a man
with mules, which he could not understand. "Why doesn't
he come? Why doesn't he come?" she repeated. He was
appalled to think of the dirty little man downstairs in con-
nection with illness like this, and turned instinctively to Helen,
but she was doing something at a table in the window, and
did not seem to realise how great the shock to him must be.
He rose to go, for he could not endure to listen any longer ; his
heart beat quickly and painfully with anger and misery. As
he passed Helen she asked him in the same weary, unnatural,
but determined voice to fetch her more ice, and to have the
jug outside filled with fresh milk.

When he had done these errands he went to find Hirst.
Exhausted and very hot, St. John had fallen asleep on a
bed, but Terence woke him without scruple.

"Helen thinks she's worse," he said. "There's no douttf
she's frightfully ill. Rodriguez is useless. We must get
another doctor."

"But there is no other doctor," said Hirst drowsily, sitting
up and rubbing his eyes.

"Don't be a damned fool !" Terence exclaimed. "Of course
there's another doctor, and, if there isn't, youVe got to find
one. It ought to have been done days ago. Tm going down
to saddle the horse." He could not stay ^ill in one place.

In less than ten minutes St. John was riding to the town in
the scorching heat in search of a doctor, his orders being to
find one and bring him back if he had to be fetched in a
special train.

"We ought to have done it days ago," Hewet repeated
angrily.

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When he went back into the drawing-room he found that
Mrs. Flushing was there, standing very erect in the middle of
the room, having arrived, as people did in these days, by the
kitchen or through the garden unannounced.

"She's better?" Mrs Flushing enquired abruptly; they did
not attempt to shake hands.

"No," said Terence. "If anything, they think she's worse."

Mrs. Flushing seemed to consider for a moment or two,
looking straight at Terence all the time.

"Let me tell you," she said, speaking in nervous jerks, "it's
always about the seventh day one begins to get anxious. I
daresay you've been sittin' here worryin' by yourself. You
think she's bad, but any one comin' with a fresh eye would see
she was better. Mr. Elliot's had fever; he's all right now,"
she threw out. "It wasn't anythin* she caught on the expedi-
tion. What's it matter — a few days' fever? My brother had
fever for twenty-six days once. And in a week or two he was
up and about. We gave him nothin' but milk and arrow-
root "

Here Mrs. Chailey came in with a message.

"I'm wanted upstairs," said Terence.

"You see — she'll be better," Mrs. Flushing jerked out as
he left the room. Her anxiety to persuade Terence was very
great, and when he left her without saying anything she felt
dissatisfied and restless ; she did not like to stay, but she could
not bear to go. She wandered from room to room looking
for some one to talk to, but all the rooms were empty.

Terence went upstairs, stood inside the door to take Helen's
directions, looked over at Rachel, but did not attempt to speak
to her. She appeared vaguely conscious of his presence, but it
seemed to disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her
back to him.

For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world out-
side, because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red,
quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She
knew that it was of enormous importance that she should
attend to these sights and grasp their meaning, but she was
always being just too late to hear or see something which
would explain it all. For this reason, the faces, — Helen's

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face, the nurse's, Terence's, the doctor's, — which occasionally
forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because
they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. How-
ever, on the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep
Helen's face distinct from the sights themselves; her lips
widened as she bent down over the bed, and she began to
gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The sights were all con-
cerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape. The nature
of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there
was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to
grasp. Now they were among trees and savages, now they
were on the sea; now they were on the tops of high towers;
now they jumped; now they flew. But just as the crisis was
about to happen, something invariably slipped in her brain,
so that the whole effort had to begin over again. The heat
was suffocating. At last the faces went further away; she
fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed
over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a
faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling
over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she
was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the
sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes
light, while every now and then some one turned her over at
the bottom of the sea.

After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun
wrangling with evasive and very garrulous natives, he ex-
tracted the information that there was a doctor, a French
doctor, who was at present away on a holiday in the hills. It
was quite impossible, so they said, to find him. With his
experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely that a
telegram would either be sent or received ; but having reduced
the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from
a hundred miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage
and horses, he started at once to fetch the doctor himself. He
succeeded in finding him, and eventually forced the unwilling
man to leave his young wife and return forthwith. They
reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.

Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck

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by the fact that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the inter-
val ; he was white too ; his eyes looked strange. But the curt
speech and the sulky masterful manner of Dr. Lesage im-
pressed them both favourably, although at the same time it
was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the whole
affair. Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically,
but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because
of the presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well
as malicious, or because he took it for granted that they knew
already what was to be known.

"Of course," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when
Terence asked him, "Is she very ill?"

They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when
Dr. Lesage was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising
another visit in a few hours' time ; but, unfortunately, the rise
of their spirits led them to talk more than usual, and in talking
they quarrelled. They quarrelled about a road, the Ports-
mouth Road. St. John said that it is macadamised where it
passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he knew his
own name that it is not macadamised at that point. In the
course of the argument they said some very sharp things to
each other, and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence,
save for an occasional half-stifled reflection from Ridley.

When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence
felt unable to control his irritation any longer. St. John went
to bed in a state of complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-
night with rather more affection than usual because of their
quarrel, and Ridley retired to his books. Left alone, Terence
walked up and down the room ; he stood at the open window.

The lights were coming out one after another in the town
beneath, and it was very peaceful and cool in the garden, so
that he stepped out on to the terrace. As he stood there in
the darkness, able only to see the shapes of trees through the
fine grey light, he was overcome by a desire to escape, to have
done with this suffering, to forget that Rachel was ill. He
allowed himself to lapse into forgetfulness of everything. As
if a wind that had been raging incessantly suddenly fell
asleep, the fret and strain and anxiety which had been press-
ing on him passed away. He seemed to stand in an unvexed

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space of air, on a little island by himself; he was free and
immune from pain. It did not matter whether Rachel was
well or ill; it did not matter whether they were apart or
together; nothing mattered — ^nothing mattered. The waves
beat on the shore far away, and the soft wind passed through
the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace
and security, with dark and nothingness. Surely the world
of strife and fret and anxiety was not the real world, but this
was the real world, the world that lay beneath the superficial
world, so that, whatever happened, one was secure. The quiet
and peace seemed to lap his body in a fine cool sheet, soothing
every nerve; his mind seemed once more to expand, and
become natural.

But when he had stood thus for a time a noise in the house
roused him ; he turned instinctively and went into the drawing-
room. The sight of the lamp-lit room brought back so abruptly
all that he had forgotten that he stood for a moment unable
to move. He remembered ever)rthing, the hour, the minute
even, what point they had reached, and what was to come. He
cursed himself for making believe for a minute that things
were different from what they are. The night was now harder
to face than ever.

Unable to stay in the empty drawing-room, he wandered
out and sat on the stairs half-way up to Rachel's room. He
longed for some one to talk to, but Hirst was asleep, and Ridley
was asleep ; there was no sound in Rachel's room. The only
sound in the house was the sound of Qiailey moving in the
kitchen. At last there was a rustling on the stairs overhead,
and Nurse Mclnnis came down fastening the links in her
cuffs, in preparation for the night's watch. Terence rose and
stopped her. He had scarcely spoken to her, but it was possi-
ble that she might confirm him in the belief which still per-
sisted in his own mind that Rachel was not seriously ill. He
told her in a whisper that Dr. Lesage had been and what he
had said.

"Now, Nurse," he whispered, "please tell me your opinion.
Do you consider that she is very seriously ill? Is she in any
danger?*'

"The doctor has said " she began.

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"Yes, but I want your opinion. You have had experience
of many cases like this?"

"I could not tell you more than Dr. Lesage, Mr. Hewet,"
she replied cautiously, as though her words might be used
against her. "The case is serious, but you may feel quite
certain that we are doing all we can for Miss Vinrace." She
spoke with some professional self-approbation. But she
realised perhaps that she did not satisfy the young man, who
still blocked her way, for she shifted her feet slightly upon
the stair and looked out of the window where they could see
the moon over the sea.

"If you ask me," she began in a curiously stealthy tone, "I
never like May for my patients."

"May?" Terence repeated.

"It may be a fancy, but I don't like to see anybody fall ill
in May," she continued. "Things seem to go wrong in May.
Perhaps it's the moon. They say the moon affects the brain,
don't they. Sir?"

He looked at her but he could not answer her ; like all the
others, when one looked at her she seemed to shrivel beneath
erne's eyes and become worthless, malicious, and untrust-
worthy.

She slipped past him and disappeared.

Though he went to his room he was unable even to take
his clothes off. For a long time he paced up and down, and
then leaning out of the window gazed at the earth which lay
so dark against the paler blue of the sky. With a mixture of
fear and loathing he looked at the slim black C3rpress trees
which were still visible in the garden, and heard the unfa-
miliar creaking and grating sounds which show that the earth
is still hot. All these sights and sounds appeared sinister and
full of hostility and foreboding; together with the natives
and the nurse and the doctor and the terrible force of the illness
itself they seemed to be in conspiracy against him. They
seemed to join together in their effort to extract the greatest
possible amount of suffering from him. He could not get
used to his pain, it was a revelation to him. He had never
realised before that underneath every action, underneath the
life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour ; he

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seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling
up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men
and women* He thought for the first time with understand-
ing of words which had before seemed to him empty: the
struggle of life; the hardness of life. Now he knew for
himself that life is hard and full of suffering. He looked at
the scattered lights in the town beneath, and thought of Arthur
and Susan, or Evelyn and Perrott venturing out unwittingly,
and by their happiness laying themselves open to suffering
such as this. How did they dare to love each other, he won-
dered; how had he himself dared to live as he had lived,
rapidly and carelessly, passing from one thing to another, lov-
ing Rachel as he had loved her? Never again would he feel
secure; he would never believe in the stability of life, or
forget what depths of pain lie beneath small happiness and
feelings of content and safety. It seemed to him as he looked
back that their happiness had never been so great as his pain
was now. There had always been something imperfect in their
happiness, something they had wanted and had not been able
to get. It had been fragmentary and incomplete, because they
were so young and had not known what they were doing.

The light of his candle flickered over the boughs of a tree
outside the window, and as the branch swayed in the darkness
there came before his mind a picture of all the world that lay
outside his window; he thought of the immense river and
the immense forest, the vast stretches of dry earth and the
plains of the sea that encircled the earth; from the sea the
sky rose steep and enormous, and the air washed profoundly
between the sky and the sea. How vast and dark it must
be to-night, lying exposed to the wind; and in all this great
space it was curious to think how few the towns were, and
how like little rings of light they were, scattered here and there
among the swelling uncultivated folds of the world. And in
those towns were little men and women, tiny men and women.
Oh, it was absurd, when one thought of it, to sit here in a
little room suffering and caring. What did an)rthing matter?
Rachel, a tiny creature, lay ill beneath him, and here in his
Kttle room he suffered on her account. The nearness of their
bodies in this vast universe, and the minuteness of their bodies.

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seemed to him absurd and laughable. Nothing mattered, he
repeated; they had no power, no hope. He leant on the
window-sill, thinking, until he almost forgot the time and
the place. Nevertheless, although he was convinced that it
was absurd and laughable, and that they were small and hope-
less, he never lost the sense that these thoughts somehow
formed part of a life which he and Rachel would live together.

Owing perhaps to the change of doctor, Rachel appeared to
be rather better next day. Terribly pale and worn though
Helen looked, there was a slight lifting of the cloud which had
hung all these days in her eyes.

"She talked to me," she said voluntarily. "She asked me
what day of the week it was, like herself."

Then suddenly, without any warning or any apparent rea-
son, the tears formed in her eyes and rolled steadily down
her cheeks. She cried with scarcely any attempt at movement
of her features, and without any attempt to stop herself, as if
she did not know that she was crying. In spite of the relief
which her words gave him, Terence was dismayed by the sight ;
had everything given way ? Were there no limits to the power
of this illness? Would everything go down before it? Helen
had always seemed to him strong and determined, and now she
was like a child. He took her in his arms, and she clung to him
like a child, crying softly and quietly upon his shoulder. Then
she roused herself and wiped her tears away; it was silly to
behave like that, she said ; very silly, she repeated, when there
could be no doubt that Rachel was better. She asked Terence
to forgive here for her folly. She stopped at the door and
came back and kissed him without sapng anything.

On this day indeed Rachel was conscious of what went on
round Tier. She had come to the surface of the dark, sticky
pool, and a wave seemed to bear her up and down with it;
she had ceased to have any will of her own ; she lay on the
top of the wave conscious of some pain, but chiefly of weak-
ness. The wave was replaced by the side of a mountain. Her
body became a drift of melting snow, above which her knees
rose in huge peaked mountains of bare bone. It was true
that she saw Helen and saw her room, but everything had
become very pale and semi-transparent. Sometimes she could

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see through the wall in front of her. Sometimes when Helen
went away she seemed to go so far that Rachel's eyes could
hardly follow her. The room also had an odd power of ex-
panding, and though she pushed her voice out as far as possible
until sometinwjs it became a bird and flew away, she thought it
doubtful whether it ever reached the person she was talking
to. There were immense intervals or chasms, for things still
had the power to appear visibly before her, between one mo-
ment and the next; it sometimes took an hour for Helen to
raise her arm, pausing long between each jerky movement, and
pour out medicine. Helen's form stooping to raise her in bed
appeared of gigantic size, and come down upon her like the
ceiling falling. But for long spaces of time she would merely
lie conscious of her body floating on the top of the bed and
her mind driven to some remote comer of her body, or
escaped and gone flitting round the room. All sights were
something of an effort, but the sight of Terence was the
greatest effort, because he forced her to join mind to body in
the desire to remember something. She did not wish to
remember; it troubled her when people tried to disturb her
loneliness; she wished to be alone. She wished for nothing
else in the world.

Although she had cried, Terence observed Helen's greater
hopefulness with something like triumph; in the argument
between them she had made the first sign of admitting herself
in the wrong. He waited for Dr. Lesage to come down that
afternoon with considerable anxiety, but with the same cer-
tainty at the back of his mind that he would in time force
them all to admit that they were in the wrong.

As usual. Dr. Lesage was sulky in his manner and very short
in his answers. To Terence's demand, "She seems to be
better ?" he replied, looking at him in an odd way, "She has a
chance of life."

The door shut and Terence walked across to the window.
He leant his forehead against the pane.

"Rachel," he repeated to himself. "She has a chance of
Ufe. Rachel."

How could they say these things of Rachel? Had any
one yesterday seriously believed that Rachel was dying? They

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had been engaged for four weeks. A fortnight ago she had
been perfectly well. What could fourteen days have done
to bring her from that state to this? To realise what they
meant by saying that she had a chance of life was beyond
him, knowing as he did that they were engaged. He turned,
still enveloped in the same dreary mist, and walked towards
the door. Suddenly he saw it all. He saw the room and the
garden, and the trees moving in the air, they could go on
without her; she could die. For the first time since she fell
ill he remembered exactly what she looked like and the way
in which they cared for each other. The intense happiness of
feeling her close to him mingled with a more intense anxiety
than he had felt yet. He could not let her die ; he could not
live without her. But after a momentary struggle, the cur-
tain fell again, and he saw nothing and felt nothing clearly.
It was all going on; — going on still, in the same way as before.
Save for a physical pain when his heart beat, and the fact
that his fingers were icy cold, he did not realise that he was
anxious about anything. Within his mind he seemed to feel
nothing about Rachel or about any one or anything in the
world. He went on giving orders, arranging with Mrs. Chailey,
writing out lists, and every now and then he went upstairs and
put something quietly on the table outside Rachel's door. That
night Dr. Lesage seemed to be less sulky than usual. He
stayed voluntarily for a few moments, and, addressing St.
John and Terence equally, as if he did not remember which
of them was engaged to the young lady, said, "I consider that
her condition to-night is very grave.*'

Neither of them went to bed or suggested that the other
should go to bed. They sat in the drawing-room playing
picquet with the door open. St. John made up a bed upon the
sofa, and when it was ready insisted that Terence should lie
upon it. They began to quarrel as to who should lie on the
sofa and who should lie upon a couple of chairs covered
with rugs. St. John forced Terence at last to lie down upon
the sofa.

''Don't be a fool, Terence," he said. ''You'll only get ill
if you don't sleep."

"Old fellow," he began, as Terence still refused, and stopped

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abruptly, fearing sentimentality ; he found that he was on the
verge of tears.

He began to say what he had long been wanting to say,
that he was sorry for Terence, that he cared for him, that he
cared for Rachel. Did she know how much he cared for her —
had she said an)rthing, asked perhaps? He was very anxious
to say this, but he refrained, thinking that it was a selfish
question after all, and what was the use of bothering Terence
to talk about such things? He was already half asleep. But
St. John could not sleep at once. If only, he thought to him-
self, as he lay in the darkness, something would happen — ^if
only this strain would come to an end. He did not mind what
happened, so long as the succession of these hard and dreary
days was brokeir; he did not mind if she died. He felt himself
disloyal in not minding it, but it seemed to him that he had
no feelings left.

All night long there was no call or movement, except the
opening and shutting of the bedroom door once. By degrees
the light returned into the untidy room. At six the servants
began to move ; at seven they crept downstairs into the kitchen ;
and half an hour later the day began again.

Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone
before, although it would have been hard to say in what the
diflference consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be
waiting for something. There were certainly fewer things to
be done than usual. People drifted through the drawing-room
— Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They spoke very
apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but remain-
ing for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
they had to say was, "Is there anything we can do?" and
there was nothing they could do.

Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how
Helen had said that whenever an)rthing happened to you this
was how people behaved. Was she right, or was she wrong?
He was too little interested to frame an opinion of his own.
He put things away in his mind, as if one of these days he
would think about them, but not now. The mist of unreality
had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling

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of numbness all over his body. Was it his body? Were those
really his own hands?

This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossi-
ble to sit alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable
downstairs, and, as he did not know what was going on, con-
stantly in the way ; but he would not leave the drawing-room.
Too restless to read, and having nothing to do, he began to
pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
in various ways — ^now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking
bottles, now in writing directions, the sound of Ridley's song
and the beat of his pacing worked into the minds of Terence
and St. John all the morning as a half comprehended refrain.

They wrestled up, they wrestled down.

They wrestled sore and still:
The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
That night he had his will.

Like stags full spent, among the bent
They dropped awhile to rest

"Oh, it's intolerable!" Hirst exclaimed, and then checked
himself, as if it were a breach of their agreement. Again and
again Terence would creep half-way up the stairs in case he
might be able to glean news of Rachel. But the only news
now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had drunk some-
thing ; she had slept a little ; she seemed quieter. In the same
way. Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save
once when he volimteered the information that he had just
been called in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that
an old lady of eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror
of being buried alive.

"It is a horror," he remarked, "that we generally find in the
very old, and seldom in the young." They both expressed their
interest in what he told them ; it seemed to them very strange.
Another strange thing about the day was that the luncheon
was forgotten by all of them until it was late in the afternoon,
and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked strange
too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were
rolled up above her elbows. She seemed as oblivious of her
appearance, however, as if she had been called out of her bed

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by a midnight alarm of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her
reserve and her composure ; she talked to them quite familiarly
as if she had nursed them and held them naked on her knee.
She assured them over and over again that it was their duty
to eat.

The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly
than they expected. Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but
on seeing them shut it again quickly ; once Helen came down
to fetch something, but she stopped as she left the room to
look at a letter addressed to her. She stood for a moment
turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful beauty of
her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him now —
as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought
about afterwards. They scarcely spoke, the argument between
them seeming to be suspended or forgotten.

Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house,
Ridley paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of
a long poem, in a subdued but suddenly sonorous voice. Frag-
ments of the poem were wafted in at the open window as he
passed and repassed.

Peor and Baalim

Forsake their Temples dim.

With that twice batter'd God of Palestine
And mooned Astaroth —

The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to
both the young men, but they had to be borne. As the evening
drew on and the red light of the sunset glittered far away
on the sea, the same sense of desperation attacked both
Terence and St. John at the thought that the day was nearly
over, and that another night was at hand. The appearance of
one light after another in the town beneath them produced in
Hirst a repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break
down and sob. Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey.
She explained that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so
foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she had boimd it up; it
was unfortunate when there was so much work to be done.
Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet,
but it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice

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of the unruly flesh of servants. The evening went on. Dr.
Lesage arrived unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long
time. He came down once and drank a cup of coffee.

"She is very ill," she said in answer to Ridley's question.
All the annoyance had by this time left his manner, he was
grave and formal, but at the same time it was full of consid-
eration, which had not marked it before. He went upstairs
again. The three men sat together in the drawing-room. Rid-
ley was quite quiet now, and his attention seemed to be thor-
oughly awakened. Save for little half-voluntary movements
and exclamations that were stifled at once, they waited in com-
plete silence. It seemed as if they were at last brought together
face to face with something definite.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when Dr. Lesage again appeared
in the room. He approached them very slowly, and did not
speak at once. He looked first at St. John and then at Terence,
and said to Terence, "Mr. Hcwet, I think you should go up-
stairs now."

Terence rose immediately, leaving the others seated with
Dr. Lesage standing motionless between them.

Chailey was in the passage outside, repeating over and over
again, "It's wicked — it's wicked."

Terence paid her no attention ; he heard what she was saying,
4)ut it conveyed no meaning to his mind. All the way upstairs
he kept sa3ring to himself, "This has not happened to me. It
is not possible that this has happened to me."

He looked curiously at his own hand on the banisters. The
stairs were very steep, and it seemed to take him a long time
to surmount them. Instead of feeling keenly, as he knew that
he ought to feel, he felt nothing at all. When he opened the
door he saw Helen sitting by the bedside. There were shaded
lights on the table, and the room, though it seemed to be
full of a great many things, was very tidy. There was a faint
and not unpleasant smell of disinfectants. Helen rose and
gave up her chair to him in silence. As they passed each other
their eyes met in a peculiar level glance, he wondered at the
extraordinary clearness of her eyes, and at the deep calm and
sadness that dwelt in them. He sat down by the bedside, and
a moment afterwards heard the door shut gently behind her.

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He was alone with Rachel, and a faint reflection of the sense
of relief that they used to feel when they were left alone
possessed him. He looked at her. He expected to find some
terrible change in her, but there was none. She looked indeed
very thin, and, as far as he could see, very tired, but she was
the same as she had always been. Moreover, she saw him and
knew him. She smiled at him and said, "Hullo, Terence."

The curtain which had been drawn between them for so
long vanished immediately.

"Well, Rachel," he replied in his usual voice, upon which
she opened her eyes quite widely and smiled with her familiar
smile. He kissed her and took her hand.

"It's been wretched without you," he said.

She still looked at him and smiled, but soon a slight look of
fatigue or perplexity came into her eyes and she shut them
again.

"But when we're together we're perfectly happy," he said.
He continued to hold her hand.

The light being dim, it was impossible to see any change in
her face. An immense feeling of peace came over Terence, so
that he had no wish to move or to speak. The terrible torture
and unreality of the last days were over, and he had come
out now into perfect certainty and peace. His mind began to
work naturally again and with great ease. The longer he sat
there the more prof otmdly was he conscious of the peace in-
vading every corner of his soul. Once he held his breath and
listened acutely; she was still breathing; he went on thinking
for some time ; they seemed to be thinking together ; he seemed
to be Rachel as well as himself ; and then he listened again ; no,
she had ceased to breathe. So much the better — ^this was death.
It was nothing ; it was to cease to breathe. It was happiness,
it was perfect happiness. They had now what they had always
wanted to have, the union which had been impossible while
they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or
spoke them aloud, he said, "No two people have ever been so
happy as we have been. No one has ever loved as we have
loved."

It seemed to him that their complete union and happiness
filled the room with rings eddying more and more widely. He

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had no wish in the world left unfulfilled. They possessed what
could never be taken from them.

He was not conscious that any one had come into the room,
but later, moments later, or hours later perhaps, he felt an arm
behind him. The arms were round him. He did not want
to have arms round him, and the mysterious whispering voices
annoyed him. He laid Rachel's hand, which was now cold,
upon the counterpane, and rose from his chair, and walked
across to the window. The windows were uncurtained, and
showed the moon, and a long silver pathway upon the surface
of the waves.

"Why," he said, in his ordinary tone of voice, "look at the
moon. There's a halo round the moon. We shall have rain
to-morrow."

The arms, whether they were the arms of man or of woman,
were round him again ; they were pushing him gently towards
the door. He turned of his own accord and walked steadily in
advance of the arms, conscious of a little amusement at the
strange way in which people behaved merely because some one.
was dead. He would go if they wished it, but nothing they
could do would disturb his happiness.

As he saw the passage outside the room, and the table with
the cups and the plates, it suddenly came over him that here
was a world in which he would never see Rachel again.

"Rachel! Rachel!" he shrieked, trying to rush back to her.
But they prevented him, and pushed him down the passage
and into a bedroom far from her room. Downstairs they could
hear the thud of his feet on the floor, as he struggled to break
free ; and twice they heard him shout, "Rachel, Rachel !"

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CHAPTER XXVI

FOR two or three hours longer the moon poured its light
through the empty air. Unbroken by clouds it fell
straightly, and lay almost like a chill white frost over the sea
and the earth. During these hours the silence was not broken,
and the only movement was caused by the movement of trees
and branches which stirred slightly, and then the shadows that
lay across the white spaces of the land moved too. In this pro-
found silence one sound only was audible, the sound of a slight
but continuous breathing which never ceased, although it never
rose and never fell. It continued after the birds had begun
to flutter from branch to branch, and could be heard behind
the first thin notes of their voices. It continued all through
the hours when the east whitened, and grew red, and a faint
blue tinged the sky, but when the sun rose it ceased, and gave
place to other sounds.

The first sounds that were heard were little inarticulate
cries, the cries, it seemed, of children or of the very poor, of
people who were very weak or in pain. But when the sun was
above the horizon, the air which had been thin and pale grew
every moment richer and warmer, and the sounds of life
became bolder and more full of courage and authority. By
degrees the smoke began to ascend in wavering breaths over
the houses, and these slowly thickened, until they were as
round and straight as columns, and instead of striking upon
pale white blinds, the sun shone upon dark windows, beyond
which there was depth and space.

The sun had been up for many hours, and the great dome
of air was warmed through and glittering with thin gold
threads of sunlight, before any one moved in the hotel. White
and massive it stood in the early light, half asleep with its
blinds down.

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At about half-past nine Miss Allan came very slowly into
the hall, and walked very slowly to the table where the morn-
ing papers were laid, but she did not put out her hand to
take one ; she stood still, thinking, with her head a little sunk
upon her shoulders. She looked curiously old, and from the
way in which she stood, a little hunched together and very
massive, you could see what she would be like when she was
really old, how she would sit day after day in her chair look-
ing placidly in front of her. Other people began to come
into the room, and to pass her, but she did not speak to any
of them or even look at them, and as last, as if it were necessary
to do something, she sat down in a chair, and looked quietly
and fixedly in front of her. She felt very old this morning,
and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it had
been hard and laborious to no purpose. She did not want to
go on living, and yet she knew that she would. She was so
strong that she would live to be a very old woman. She
would probably live to be eighty, and as she was now fifty, that
left thirty years more for her to live. She turned her hands
over and over in her lap and looked at them curiously ; her old
hands, that had done so much work for her. There did not
seem to be much point in it all; one went on, of course one
went on. . . . She looked up to see Mrs. Thornbury standing
beside her, with lines drawn upon her forehead, and her lips
parted as if she were about to ask a question.

Miss Allan anticipated her.

"Yes," she said. "She died this morning, very early, about
three o'clock."

Mrs. Thornbury made a little exclamation, drew her lips
together, and the tears rose in her eyes. Through them she
looked at the hall which was now laid with great breadths of
sunlight, and at the careless, casual groups of people who were
standing beside the solid arm-chairs and tables. They looked
to her unreal, or as people look who remain unconscious that
some great explosion is about to take place beside them. But
there was no explosion, and they went on standing by the
chairs and the tables. Mrs. Thornbury no longer saw them,
but, penetrating through them as though they were without
substance, she saw the house, the people in the house, the

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room, the bed in the room, and the figure of the dead lying
still in the dark beneath the sheets. She could almost see the
dead. She could almost hear the voices of the mourners.

"They expected it?" she asked at length.

Miss Allan could only shake her head.

"I know nothing," she replied, "except what Mrs. Flushing's
maid told me. She died early this morning."

The two women looked at each other with a quiet significant
gaze, and then, feeling oddly dazed, and seeking she did not
know exactly what, Mrs. Thornbury went slowly upstairs and
walked quietly along the passages, touching the wall with her
fingers as if to guide herself. Housemaids were passing
briskly from room to room, but Mrs. Thornbury avoided
them ; she hardly saw them ; they seemed to her to be in an-
other world. She did not even look up directly when Evelyn
stopped her. It was evident that Evelyn had been lately in
tears, and when she looked at Mrs. Thornbury she began to
cry again. Together they drew into the hollow of a window,
and stood there in silence. Broken words formed themselves
at last among Evelyn's sobs. "It was wicked," she sobbed,
"it was cruel — they were so happy."

Mrs. Thornbury patted her on the shoulder.

"It seems hard — very hard," she said. She paused and
looked out over the slope of the hill at the Ambroses' villa;
the windows were blazing in the sun, and she thought how the
soul of the dead had passed from those windows. Something
had passed from the world. It seemed to her strangely empty.

"And yet the older one grows," she continued, her eyes re-
gaining more than their usual brightness, "the more certain one
becomes that there is a reason. How could one go on if
there were no reason?" she asked.

She asked the question of some one, but she did not ask
it of Evelyn. Evelyn's sobs were becoming quieter. "There
must be a reason," she said. "It can't only be an accident.
For it was an accident — it need never have happened."

Mrs. Thornbury sighed deeply.

"But we must not let ourselves think of that," she added,
"and let us hope that they don't either. Whatever they had
done it might have been the same. These terrible illnesses "

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"There's no reason — I don't believe there's any reason at
all!" Evelyn broke out, pulling the blind down and letting it
fly back with a little snap.

"Why should these things happen? Why should people
suffer? I honestly believe," she went on, lowering her voice
slightly, "that Rachel's in Heaven, but Terence. ..."

"What's the good of it all?" she demanded.

Mrs. Thombury shook her head slightly but made no reply,
and pressing Evelyn's hand she went on down the passage.
Impelled by a strong desire to hear something, although she did
not know exactly what there was to hear, she was making her
way to the Flushings' room. As she opened their door she
felt that she had interrupted some argument between husband
and wife. Mrs. Flushing was sitting with her back to the
light, and Mr. Flushing was standing near her, arguing and
trying to persuade her of something.

"Ah, here is Mrs. Thombury," he began with some relief in
his voice. "You have heard, of course. My wife feels that she
was in some way responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace
to come on the expedition. I'm sure you will agree with me
that it is most unreasonable to feel that. We don't even know
— in fact I think it most unlikely — ^that she caught her illness
there. These diseases — Besides, she was set on going. She
would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice."

"Don't, Wilfrid," said Mrs. Flushing, neither moving nor
taking her eyes off the spot on the floor upon which they

rested. "What's the use of talking? What's the use ?"

She ceased.

"I was coming to ask you," said Mrs. Thornbury, addressing
Wilfrid, for it was useless to speak to his wife. "Is there
anything you think that one could do? Has the father
arrived? Could one go and see?"

The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be
able to do something for the unhappy people — to see them —
to assure them — to help them. It was dreadful to be so far
away from them. But Mr. Flushing shook his head; he did
not think that now — later perhaps one might be able to help.
Here Mrs. Flushing rose stiffly, turned her back to them, and
walked to the dressing-room opposite. As she walked, they

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could see her breast slowly rise and slowly fall. But her
grief was silent. She shut the door behind her.

When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists to-
gether, and began beating the back of a chair with them. She
was like a wounded animal. She hated death ; she was furious,
outraged, indignant with death, as if it were a living creature.
She refused to relinquish her friends to death. She would not
submit to dark and nothingness. She began to pace up and
down, clenching her hands, and making no attempt to stop the
quick tears which raced down her cheeks. She sat still at last,
but she did not submit. She looked stubborn and strong when
she had ceased to cry.

In the next room, meanwhile, Wilfrid was talking to Mrs.
Thombury with greater freedom now that his wife was not
sitting there.

"That's the worst of these places," he said. "People will
behave as though they were in England, and they're not. I've
no doubt myself that Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at
the villa itself. She probably ran risks a dozen times a day
that might have given her the illness. It's absurd to say she
caught it with us."

If he had not been sincerely sorry for them he would have
been annoyed. "Pepper tells me," he continued, "that he left
the house because he thought them so careless. He says they
never washed their vegetables properly. Poor people ! It's a
fearful price to pay. But it's only what I've seen over and
over again — people seem to forget that these things happen, and
then they do happen, and they're surprised."

Mrs. Thombury agreed with him that they had been very
careless, and that there was no reason whatever to think that
she had caught the fever on the expedition ; and after talking
about other things for a short time, she left him and went
sadly along the passage to her own room. There must be some
reason why such things happen, she thought to herself, as she
shut the door. Only at first it was not easy to understand what
it was. It seemed so strange — so unbelievable. Why, only
three weeks ago — only a fortnight ago, she had seen Rachel;
when she shut her eyes she could almost see (ler now, the

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quiet, shy girl who was going to be married. She thought of
all that she would have missed had she died at Rachel's age,
the children, the married life, the unimaginable depths and
miracles that seemed to her, as she looked back, to have
lain about her, day after day, and year after year. The stunned
feeling, which had been making it difficult for her to think,
gradually gave way to a feeling of the opposite nature; she
thought very quickly and very clearly, and, looking back over
all her experiences, tried to fit them into a kind of order.
There was undoubtedly much suffering, much struggling, but,
on the whole, surely there was a balance of happiness — surely
order did prevail. Nor were the deaths of young people really
the saddest things in life — they were saved so much; they
kept so much. The dead — she called to mind those who had
died early, accidentally — ^were beautiful; she often dreamt
of the dead. And in time Terence himself would come to

feel She got up and began to. wander restlessly about the

room. I

For an old woman of her age she was very restless, and for
one of her clear, quick mind she was unusually perplexed.
She could not settle to anything, so that she was relieved when
the door opened. She went up to her husband, took him in
her arms, and kissed him with unusual intensity, and then as
they sat down together she began to pat him and question him
as if he were a baby, an old, tired, querulous baby. She did
not tell him abou{ Miss Vinrace's death, for that would only
disturb him, and he was put out already. She tried to discover
why he was uneasy. Politics again ? What were those horrid
people doing ? She spent the whole morning in discussing poli-
tics with her husband, and by degrees she became deeply inter-
ested in what they were saying. But every now and then
what she was saying seemed to her oddly empty of meaning.

At luncheon it was remarked by several people that the
visitors at the hotel were beginning to leave ; there were fewer
every day. There were only forty people at luncheon, instead
of the sixty that there had been. So old Mrs. Paley com-
puted, gazing about her with her faded eyes, as she took her
seat at her own table in the window. Her party generally con-

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sisted of Mr. Perrott as well as Arthur and Susan, and to-day
Evelyn was lunching with them also.

She was unusually subdued. Having noticed that her eyes
were red, and guessing the reason, the others took pains to keep
up an elaborate conversation between themselves. She suffered
it to go on for a few minutes, leaning both elbows on the table,
and leaving her soup untouched, when she exclaimed suddenly,
"I don't know how you feel, but I can simply think of nothing
else!"

The gentlemen murmured sympathetically, and looked grave.

Susan replied, "Yes — isn't it perfectly awful? When you
think what a nice girl she was — only just engaged, and this
need never have happened — it seems too tragic." She looked at
Arthur as though he might be able to help her with something
more suitable.

"Hard lines," said Arthur briefly. "But it was a foolish
thing to do — ^to go up that river." He shook his head. "They
should have known better. You can't expect Englishwomen
to stand roughing it as the natives do who've been acclimatised.
I'd half a mind to warn them at tea that day when it was
being discussed. But it's no good sa)dng these sort of things —
it only puts people's backs up — ^it never makes any difference."

Old Mrs. Paley, hitherto contented with her soup, here
intimated, by raising one hand to her ear, that she wished to
know what was being said.

"You heard. Aunt Emma, that poor Miss Vinrace has died
of the fever," Susan informed her gently. She could not speak
of death loudly or even in her usual voice, so that Mrs. Paley
did not catch a word. Arthur came to the rescue.

"Miss Vinrace is dead," he said very distinctly.

Mrs. Paley merely bent a little towards him and asked,
''Eh?"

"Miss Vinrace is dead," he repeated. It was only by stiffen-
ing all the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent him-
self from bursting into laughter, and force himself to repeat
for the third time, "Miss Vinrace. . . . She's dead."

Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that
were outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs.
Paley's consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her

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brain, impeding, though not damaging, its action. She sat
vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what
Arthur meant.

"Dead?" she said vaguely. "Miss Vinrace dead? Dear
me . . . that's very sad. But I don't at the moment remem-
ber which she was. We seem to have made so many new
acquaintances here." She looked at Susan for help. "A tall
dark girl, who just missed being handsome, with a high
colour ?"

"No," Susan interpose,d- "She was " then she gave it

up in despair. There was no use in explaining that Mrs.
Paley was thinking of the wrong person.

"She ought not to have died," Mrs. Paley continued. "She
looked so strong. But people will drink the water. I can.
never make out why. It seems such a simple thing to tell them
to put a bottle of Seltzer water in your bedroom. That's all
the precaution I've ever taken, and I've been in every part of
the world, I may say — Italy a dozen times over, . . . But
young people always think they know better, and then they
pay the penalty. Poor thing — I am very sorry for her." But
the difficulty of peering into a dish of potatoes and helping
herself engrossed her attention.

Arthur and Susan both secretly hoped that the subject was
now disposed of, for there seemed to them something unpleas-
ant in this discussion. But Evelyn was not ready to let it drop.
Why would people never talk about the things that mattered ?

"I don't believe you care a bit !" she said, turning savagely
upon Mr. Perrott, who had sat all this time in silence.

"I ? Oh, yes, I do," he answered awkwardly, but with obvious
sincerity. Evelyn's questions made him too feel uncomfortable.

"It seems so inexplicable," Evelyn continued. "Death, I
mean. Why should she be dea;d, and not you or I? It was
only a fortnight ago that she was here with the rest of us.
What d'you believe?" she demanded of Mr. Perrott. "D'you
believe that things go on, that she's still somewhere — or d'you
think it's simply a game — ^we crumble up to nothing when we
die? I'm positive Rachel's not dead."

Mr. Perrott would have said almost an)rthing that Evelyn
wanted him to say, but to assert that he believed in the immor-

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tality of the soul was not in his power. He sat silent, more
deeply wrinkled than usual, crumbling his bread.

Lest Evelyn should next ask him what he believed, Arthur,
after making a pause equivalent to a full stop, started a com-
pletely different topic.

"Supposing," he said, "a man were to write and tell you that
he wanted five pounds because he had known your grand-
father, what would you do? It was this way. My grand-
father "

"Invented a stove," said Evelyn. "I know all about that.
We had one in the conservatory to keep the plants warm."

"Didn't know I was so famous," said Arthur. "Well," he
continued, determined at all costs to spin his story out at
length, "the old chap, being about the second best inventor
of his day, and a capable lawyer too, died, as they always do,
without making a will. Now Fielding, his clerk, with how
much justice I don't know, always claimed that he meant to do
something for him. The poor old boy's come down in the
world through trying inventions on his own account, lives in
Penge over a tobacconist's shop. I've been to see him there.
The question is — must I stump up or not? What does the
abstract spirit of justice required, Perrott? Remember, I
didn't benefit under my grandfather's will, and I've no way of
testing the truth of the story."

"I don't know much about the abstract spirit of justice,"
said Susan, smiling complacently at the others, "but I'm certain
of one thing — he'll get his five pounds !"

As Mr. Perrott proceeded to deliver an opinion, and Evelyn
insisted that he was much too stingy, like all lawyers, thinking
of the letter and not of the spirit, while Mrs. Paley required
to be kept informed between the courses as to what they were
all saying, the luncheon passed with no interval of silence,
and Arthur congratulated himself upon the tact with which
the discussion had been smoothed over.

As they left the room it happened that Mrs. Paley's wheeled
chair ran into the Elliots, who were coming through the door,
as she was going out. Brought thus to a standstill for a mo-
ment, Arthur and Susan congratulated Hughling Elliot upon
his convalesence, — he was down, cadaverous enough, for the

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first time, — and Mr. Perrott took occasion to say a few words
in private to Evelyn.

"Would there be any chance of seeing you this afternoon,
about three-thirty say? I shall be in the garden, by the
fountain."

The block dissolved before Evelyn answered. But as she
left them in the hall, she looked at him brightly and said,
"Half-past three, did you say? That'll suit me."

She ran upstairs with the feeling of spiritual exaltation and
quickened life which the prospect of an emotional scene always
aroused in her. That Mr. Perrott was again about to propose
to her, she had no doubt, and she was aware that on this
occasion she ought to be prepared with a definite answer, for
she was going away in three days' time. But she could not
bring her mind to bear upon the question. To come to a
decision was very difficult to her, because she had a natural
dislike of anything final and done with ; she liked to go on and
on — always on and on. She was leaving, and, therefore, she
occupied herself in laying her clothes out side by side upon
the bed. She observed that some were very shabby. She took
the photograph of her father and mother, and, before she laid
it away in her box, she held it for a minute in her hand. Rachel
had looked at it. Suddenly the keen feeling of some one's
personality, which things that they have owned or handled
sometimes preserves, overcame her; she felt Rachel in the
room with her ; it was as if she were on a ship at sea, and the
life of the day was as unreal as the land in the distance. But by
degrees the feeling of Rachel's presence passed away, and
she could no longer realise her. for she had scarcely known her.
But this momentary sensation left her depressed and fatigued.
What had she done with her life? What future was there
before her? What was make-believe, and what was real?
Were these proposals and intimacies and adventures real, or
was the contentment which she had seen on the faces of Susan
and Rachel more real than anything she had ever felt ?

She made herself ready to go downstairs, absent-mindedly,
but her fingers were so well trained that they did the work of
preparing her almost of their own accord. When she was
actually on the way downstairs, the blood began to circle

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tfirough her body of its own accord too, for her mind felt very
dull.

Mr. Perrott was waiting for her. Indeed, he had gone
straight into the garden after luncheon, and had been walking
up and down the path for more than half an hour, in a state
of acute suspense.

"I'm late as usual!" she exclaimed, as she caught sight of
him. "Well, you must forgive me ; I had to pack up. . . . My
word! It looks stormy! And that's a new steamer in the
bay, isn't it?"

She looked at the bay, in which a steamer was just dropping
anchor, the smoke still hanging about it, while a swift black
shudder ran through the waves. "One's quite forgotten what
rain looks like," she added.

But Mr. Perrott paid no attention to the steamer or to the
weather.

"Miss Murgatroyd," he began with his usual formality, "I
asked you to come here from a very selfish motive, I fear.
I do not think you need to be assured once more of my feelings ;
but, as you are leaving so soon, I felt that I could not let you go
without asking you to tell me — ^have I any reason to hope that
you will ever come to care for me ?"

He was very pale, and seemed unable to say any more.

The little gush of vitality which had come into Evelyn as
she ran downstairs had left her, and she felt herself impotent.
There was nothing for her to say ; she felt nothing. Now that
he was actually asking her, in his elderly gentle words, to marry
him, she felt less for him than she had ever felt before.

"Let's sit down and talk it over," she said rather un-
steadily.

Mr. Perrott followed her to a curved green seat under a tree.
They looked at the fountain in front of them, which had long
ceased to play. Evelyn kept looking at the fountain instead
of thinking of what she was sa)ring ; the fountain without any
water seemed to be the type of her own being.

"Of course I care for you," she began, rushing her words out
in a hurry; "I should be a brute if I didn't. I think you're
quite one of the nicest people I've ever known, and one of the
finest too. But I wish ... I wish you didn't care for me in

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thaf way. Are you sure you do?" For the moment she
honestly desired that he should say no.

"Quite sure," said Mr. Perrott.

"You see, I'm not as simple as most women," Evelyn con-
tinued. "I think I want more. I don't know exactly what I
feel."

He sat by her, watching her and refraining from speech.

"I sometimes think I haven't got it in me to care very much
for one person only. Some one else would make you a better
wife. I can imagine you very happy with some one else."

"If you think that there is any chance that you will come
to care for me, I am quite content to wait," said Mr. Perrott.

"Well — ^there's no hurry, is there?" said Evelyn. "Suppose
I thought it over and wrote and told you when I get back ? I'm
going to Moscow ; I'll write from Moscow."

But Mr. Perrott persisted.

"You cannot give me any kind of idea. I do not ask for a
date . . . that would be most unreasonable." He paused,
looking down at the gravel path.

As she did not immediately answer, he went on.

"I know very well that I am not— that I have not much to
offer you either in myself or in my circumstances. And I
forget; it cannot seem the miracle to you that it does to me.
Until I met you I had gone on in my own quiet way — we are
both very quiet people, my sister and I — quite content with my
lot. My friendship with Arthur was the most important thing
in my life. Now that I know you, all that has changed. You
seem to put such a spirit into everything. Life seems to hold
so many possibilities that I had never dreamt of."

"That's splendid!" Evelyn exclaimed, grasping his hand.
"Now you'll go back and start all kinds of things and make a
great name in the world ; and we'll go oti being friends, what-
ever happens . . . we'll be great friends, won't we?"

"Evelyn!" he moaned suddenly, and took her in his arms,
and kissed her. She did not resent it, although it made little
impression on her.

As she sat upright again, she said, "I never see why one
shouldn't go on being friends — though some people do. And

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friendships do make a difference, don't they? They are the
kind of things that matter in one's life?"

He looked at her with a bewildered expression as if he did
not really understand what she was saying. With a consid-
erable effort he collected himself, stood up, and said, "Now
I think I have told you what I feel, and I will only add that
I can wait as long as ever you wish."

Left alone, Evel)m walked up and down the path. What
did matter then? What was the meaning of it all?

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CHAPTER XXVII

ALL that evening the clouds gathered, until they closed
entirely over the blue of the sky. They seemed to nar-
row the space between earth and heaven, so that there was
no room for the air to move in freely; and the waves, too,
lay flat, and yet rigid, as if they were restrained. The leaves
on the bushes and trees in the garden hung closely together,
and the feeling of pressure and restraint was increased by
the short chirping sounds which came from birds and insects.

So strange were the lights and the silence that the busy
hum of voices which usually filled the dining-room at meal
times had distinct gaps in it, and during these silences the clat-
ter of the knives upon plates became audible. The first roll of
thunder and the first heavy drop striking the pane caused a
little stir.

"It's coming!" was said simultaneously in many different
languages.

There was then a profound silence, as if the thunder had
withdrawn into itself. People had just begun to eat again,
when a gust of cold air came through the open windows,
lifting tablecloths and skirts, a light flashed, and was instantly
followed by a clap of thunder right over the hotel. The rain
swished with it, and immediately there were all those sounds
of windows being shut and doors slamming violently which
accompany a storm.

The room grew suddenly several degrees darker, for the
wind seemed to be driving waves of darkness across the earth.
No one attempted to eat for a time, but sat looking out at the
garden, with their forks in the air. The flashes now came
frequently, lighting up faces as if they were going to be
photographed, surprising them in tense and unnatural ex-
pressions. The clap followed close and violently upon them.
Several women half rose from their chairs and then sat dowil

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again, but dinner was continued uneasily with eyes upon the
garden. The bushes outside were ruffled and whitened, and
the wind pressed upon them so that they seemed to stoop to
the ground. The waiters had to press dishes upon the diners'
notice; and the diners had to draw the attention of waiters,
for they were all absorbed in looking at the storm. As the
thunder showed no signs of withdrawing, but seemed massed
right overhead, while the lightning aimed straight at the gar-
den every time, an uneasy gloom replaced the first excitement.

Finishing the meal very quickly, people congregated in the
hall, where they felt more secure than in any other place be-
cause they could retreat far from the windows, and although
they heard the thunder, they could not see an3rthing. A little
boy was carried away sobbing in the arms of his mother.

While the storm continued, no one seemed inclined to sit
down, but they collected in little groups under the central sky-
light, where they stood in a yellow atmosphere, looking up-
wards. Now and again their faces became white, as the light-,
ning flashed, and finally a terrific crash came, making the
panes of the skylight lift at the joints.

**Ah!" several voices exclaimed at the same moment.

"Something struck," said a man's voice.

The rain rushed down. The rain seemed now to extinguish
the fightning and the thunder, and the hall became almost dark.

After a minute or two, when nothing was heard but the
rattle of water upon the glass, there was a perceptible slack-
ening of the sound, and then the atmosphere became lighter.

"It's over," said another voice.

At a touch, all the electric lights were turned on, and re-
vealed a crowd of people all standing, all looking with rather
strained faces up at the skylight, but when they saw each other
in the artificial light they turned at once and began to move
away. For some minutes the rain continued to rattle upon the
skylight, and the thunder gave another shake or two; but it
was evident from the clearing of the darkness and the light
drumming of the rain upon the roof, that the great confused
ocean of air was travelling away from them, and passing
high over head with its clouds and its rods of fire, out to sea.

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The building, which had seemed so small in the tumult of
the storm, now became as square and spacious as usual.

As the storm drew away, the people in the hall of the hotel
sat down; and with a comfortable sense of relief, began to
tell each other stories about great storms, and produced in
many cases their occupations for the evening. The chess-
board was brought out, and Mr. Elliot, who wore a stock in-
stead of a collar as a sign of convalescence, but was other-
wise much as usual, challenged Mr. Pepper to a final contest.
Round them gathered a group of ladies with pieces of needle-
work, or in default of needlework, with novels, to superintend
the game, much as if they were in charge of two small boys
pla)ring marbles. Every now and then they looked at the
board and made some encouraging remark to the gentlemen.

Mrs. Paley just round the comer had her cards arranged
in long ladders before her, with Susan sitting near to sym-
pathise but not to correct, and the merchants a»d the miscel-
laneous people who had never been discovered to possess
names were stretched in their arm-chairs with their news-
papers on their knees. The conversation in these circum-
stances was very gentle, fragmentary, and intermittent, but
the room was full of the indescribable stir of life. Every
now and then the moth, which was now grey of wing and
shiny of thorax, whizzed over their heads, and hit the lamps
with a thud.

A young woman put down her needlework amd exclaimed,
"Poor creature! it would be kinder to kill it." But nobody
seemed disposed to rouse himself in order to kill the nwth.
They watched it dash from lamp to lamp, because they were
comfortable, and had nothing to do.

On the sofa, beside the chess-players, Mrs. ElHot was im-
parting a new stitch in knitting to Mrs. Thombury, so that
their heads came very near together, and were only to be dis-
tinguished by the old kcc cap which Mrs. Thombury wore
in the evening. Mrs. Elliot was an expert at knitting, and dis-
claimed a compliment to that effect with evident pride.

"I suppose we're all proud of something," she said, "and
I'm proud of my knitting. I think things like that run in
families. We all knit well. I had an uncle who knitted his

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own socks to the day of his death — ^and he did it better than
any of his daughters, dear old gentleman. Now I wonder that
you, Miss Allan, who use your eyes so much, don't take up
knitting in the evenings. You'd find it such a relief, I should
say — ^such a rest to the eyes — ^and the bazaars are so glad of
things." Her voice dropped into the smooth half -conscious
tone of the expert knitter; the words came gently one after
another. "As much as I do I can always dispose of, which
is a comfort, for then I feel that I am not wasting my
time "

Miss Allan, being thus addressed, shut her novel and ob-
served the others placidly for a time. At last she said, "It
is surely not natural to leave your wife because she happens
to be in love with you. But that — as far as I can make out —
is what the gentleman in my story does."

"Tut, tut, that doesn't sound good — ^no, that doesn't sound
at all natural," murmured the knitters in their absorbed
voices.

, "Still, it's the kind of book people call very clever," Miss
Allan added.

''Maternity — ^by Michael Jessop — I presume," Mr. Elliot
put in, for he could never resist the temptation of talking
while he played chess.

"D'you know," said Mrs. Elliot, after a moment, "I don't
think people do write good novels now — not as good as they
used to, anyhow."

No one took the trouble to agree with her or to disagree
with her. Arthur Venning, who was strolling about, some-
times looking at the game, sometimes reading a page of a
magazine, looked at Miss Allan, who was half asleep, and said,
htmiorously, "A penny for your thoughts. Miss Allan."

The others looked up. They were glad that he had not
spoken to them. But Miss Allan replied without any hesita-
tion, "I was thinking of my imaginary uncle. Hasn't every
one got an imaginary uncle?" she continued. "I have one —
a most delightful old gentleman. He's always giving me
things. Sometimes it's a gold watch ; sometimes it's a carriage
and pair; sometimes it's a beautiful little cottage in the New
Forest ; sometimes it's a ticket to the place I most want to see."

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She set them all thinking vaguely of the things they wanted,
Mrs. Elliot knew exactly what she wanted; she wanted a
child; and the usual little pucker deepened on her brow.

**We're such lucky people," she said, looking at her hus-
band. "We really have no wants." She was apt to say this,
partly in order to convince herself, and partly in order to
convince other people. But she was prevented from wonder-
ing how far she carried conviction by the entrance of Mr. and
Mrs. Flushing, who came through the hall and stopped by the
chess-board. Mrs, Flushing looked wilder than ever. A great
strand of black hair looped down across her brow, her cheeks
were whipped a dark blood red, and drops of rain made wet
marks upon them.

Mr. Flushing explained that they had been on the roof
watching the storm.

"It was a wonderful sight," he said. "The lightning went
right out over the sea, and lit up the waves and the ships far
away. You can't think how wonderful the mountains looked
too, with the lights on them, and the great masses of shadow.
It's all over now."

He slid down into a chair, becoming interested in the final
struggle of the game.

"And you go back to-mprrow?" said Mrs. Thombury, look-
ing at Mrs. Flushing.

"Yes," she repUed.

"And indeed one is not sorry to go back," said Mrs. Elliot,
assuming an air of mournful anxiety, "after all this illness."

"Are you afraid of dyin' ?" Mrs. Flushing demanded scorn-
fully.

"I think we are all afraid of that," said Mrs. Elliot with
dignity.

"I suppose we're all cowards when it comes to the point,"
paid Mrs. Flushing, rubbing her cheek against the back of
'the chair. "I'm sure I am."

"Not a bit of it !" said Mr. Flushing, turning round, for Mr.
Pepper took a very long time to consider his move. "It's not
cowardly to wish to live, Alice. It's the very reverse of cow-
ardly. Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years —

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granted, of course, that I had the full use of my faculties.
Think of all the things that are bound to happen!"

"That is what I feel," Mrs. Thombury rejoined. **Thc
changes, the improvements, the inventions — and beauty. D*you
know, I feel sometimes that I couldn't bear to die and cease
to see beautiful things about me?"

"It would certainly be very dull to die before they have
discovered whether there is life in Mars," Miss Allan added.

**Do you really believe there's life in Mars?" asked Mrs.
Flushing, turning to her for the first time with keen interest.
"Who tells you that? Some one who knows? D'you know a
man called ?"

Here Mrs. Thornbury laid down her knitting, and a look
of extreme solicitude came into her eyes.

"There is Mr. Hirst," she said quietly.

St. John had just come through the swing door. He was
rather blown about by the wind, and his cheeks looked ter-
ribly pale, unshorn, and cavernous. After taking oflF his coat
he was going to pass straight through the hall and up to his
room, but he could not ignore the presence of so many people
he knew, especially as Mrs. Thornbury rose and went up to
him, holding out her hand. But the shock of the warm lamp*
Kt room, together with the sight of so many cheerful human
beings sitting together at their ease, after the dark walk in
the rain, and the long days of strain and horror, overcame
him completely. He looked at Mrs. Thombury and could not
speak.

Every one was silent. Mr. Pepper's hand stayed upon his
Knight. Mrs. Thornbury somehow moved him to a chair,
sat herself beside him, and with tears in her own eyes said
gently, "You have done everything for your friend."

Her action set them all talking again as if they had never
stopped, and Mr. Pepper finished the move with his Knight.

"There was nothing to be done," said St John. He spoke
very slowly. "It seems impossible——"

He drew his hand across his eyes as if some dream came
between him and the others and prevented him from seeing
where he was.

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"And that poor fellow," said Mrs. Thorabury, the tears fall-
ing again down her cheeks.

"Impossible/' St. John repeated.

"Did he have the consolation of knowing— — ?* Mrs. Thorn-
bury began very tentatively.

But St. John made no reply. He lay back in his chair, half-
seeing the others, half-bearing what they said. He was ter-
ribly tired, and the light and warmth, the movements of the
hands, and the soft communicative voices soothed him; they
gave him a strange sense of quiet and relief. As he sat there,
motionless, this feeling of relief became a feeling of profound
happiness. Without any sense of disloyalty to Terence and
Rachel he ceased to think about either of them. The move-
ments and the voices seemed to draw together from different
parts of the room, and to combine themselves into a pattern
before his eyes; he was content to sit silently watching the
pattern build itself up, looking at what he hardly saw.

The game was really a good one, and Mr. Pepper and Mr.
Elliot were becoming more and more set upon the struggle.
Mrs. Thombury, seeing that St. John did not wish to talk,
resumed her knitting.

"Lightning again!'* Mrs. Flushing suddenly exclaimed. A
yellow light flashed across the blue window, and for a second
they saw the green trees outside. She strode to the door,
pushed it open, and stood half out in the open air.

But the light was only the reflection of the storm which
was over. The rain had ceased, the heavy clouds were blown
away, and the air was thin and clear, although vapourish
mists were being driven swiftly across the moon. The sky
was once more a deep and solemn blue, and the shape of the
earth was visible at the bottom of the air, enormous, dark,
and solid, rising into the tapering mass of the mountain, and
pricked here and there on the slopes by the tiny lights of
villas. The driving air, the drone of the trees, and the flash-
ing light which now and again spread a broad illumination
over the earth filled Mrs. Flushing with exultation. Her
breasts rose and fell.

"Splendid ! Splendid !** she muttered to herself. Then she

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THE VOYAGE OUTR 875

turned back into the hall and exclaimed in a peremptory voicei
"Come outside and see, Wilfrid ; it's wonderful/*

Some half -stirred ; some rose; some dropped their balls of
wool and began to stoop to look for them.

*To bed— to bed," said Miss Allan.

"It was the move with your Queen that gave it away,
Pepper," exclaimed Mr. Elliot triumphantly, sweeping the
pieces together and standing up. He had won the game.

'*What? Pepper beaten at last? I congratulate you!" said
Arthur Venning, who was wheeling old Mrs. Paley to bed.

All these voices sounded gratefully in St. John's ears as
he lay half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything
around him. Across his eyes passed a procession of objects,
black and indistinct, the figures of people picking up their
books, their cards, their balls of wool, their work-baskets,
and passing him one after another on their way to bed.

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